Reminiscences of Oxford

REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

I

REMINISCENCES OF
OXFORD

BY THE

REV. W. TUCKWELL, M.A.

LATE FELLOW OF NEW COLLEGE

AUTHOR OF "TONGUES IN TREES," "WINCHESTER FIFTY YEARS AGO,
"REMINISCENCES OF A RADICAL PARSON," ETC. ETC.

WITH 16 ILLUSTRATIONS

SECOND EDITION

NEW YORK
E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY

31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET
1908

O Thought, that wrote all that I met,

And in the tresorie it set

Of my braine, now shall men see

If any vertue in thee bee.

Now kith thy engine and thy might.

— CHAUCER, House of Fame, ii. 18.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

PREFACE

ICH of the additional matter in this Edition has
appeared at different times in the Oxford Magazine.
Extracts are also inserted, by kind permission of
the Editor, from some of my Oxford Articles in the
Athenceum. Fresh chapters are given to Trinity
and Corpus. Names newly introduced are those
of Baden Powell, Hungerford Pollen, T. H. Green,
Hext of Corpus, Monsignor Patterson, Henry Coxe,
Vaughan Thomas, Meyrick of Trinity, F. D. Maurice,
Dean Lake, Archbishop Temple, Isaac Williams,
Warden Sewell of New College, " Tommy " Short.
The notices of Pusey, Newman, Sir H. Acland,
Provost Hawkins, Mark Pattison, are enlarged.
The brilliant squib of 1849, called "The Grand
University Logic Stakes," now very scarce, appears,
with a Notuiarum Spidlegium, in the Appendix.

55140

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. OXFORD IN THE THIRTIES I

II. ORIGINAL CHARACTERS II

III. PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 32

IV. SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 45

V. AESCULAPIUS IN THE THIRTIES .... 62

VI. CALLIOPE IN THE THIRTIES 71

VII. UNDERGRADUATES IN THE THIRTIES ... 83

VIII. MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES . . . .104

IX. SUMMA PAPAVERUM CAPITA. CHRISTCHURCH . 122

X. MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE . . . .158

XI. ORIEL 179

XII. BALLIOL 200

XIII. TRINITY 223

XIV. CORPUS . . . 239

XV. PATTISON — MAURICE — THOMSON — GOULBURN—

SEWELL . . . ... . . .252

XVI. WALK ABOUT ZION 282

APPENDICES 299

INDEX 339

vii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. The Vice-Chancellor entering St. Mary's. The "Vice," Dr.

Cotton, Provost of Worcester, is followed by his Pro-Vice-
Chancellor Plumptre, Master of University, and "Ben"
Symons, Warden of Wadham. Photographed by Mrs. Frieda
Girdlestone from a coloured drawing by the Rev. T. Woollam
Smith Frontispiece

2. " Horse" Kett, from a portrait by Dighton . To face page 15

3. Dr. Daubeny, from a photograph, 1860 . „ 33

4. Dr. Buckland. The Ansdell portrait. Repro-

duced from Mrs. Gordon's " Life of Buckland,"
by kind permission of the authoress and of the
publisher, Mr. John Murray . . . . ,, 41

5. Woodward, architect of the Museum. From a

contemporary photograph .... „ 51

6. Huxley, from a photograph taken at the Meeting

of the British Association, 1860 ... ,, 55

7. Tuckwell, from a water-colour drawing, 1883 . ,, 65

8. Charles Wordsworth, from Richmond's portrait . ,, 87

9. Pusey, from a pen-and-ink drawing of the

Thirties, photographed by Mrs. Girdlestone . ,, 132

10. Sir Frederick Ouseley, from a photograph about

1856 ,,148

11. Dr. Routh, from Pickersgill's portrait . . . „ 159

12. J. H. Newman, from a pen-and-ink drawing

1841, photographed by Mrs. Girdlestone . . „ 182

13. Mark Pattison, from a portrait in the possession

of Miss Stirke „ 252

14. John Gutch, engraved from a water-colour

belonging to the family ,, 289

15. Mother Louse, from the line engraving after

Loggan ,,290

1 6. Mother Goose, from a coloured lithograph by

Dighton „ 292

REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

CHAPTER I

OXFORD IN THE THIRTIES

" KO.I fj.T)v, fy 5' £ycb, & K^iaXe, %af/)W ye dia\ey6fji.evos T<KS
ff(f>6dpa 7iy>e<r/3urcuj." " To tell you the truth, Cephalus, I
rejoice in conversing with very old persons" — PLATO,
Republic, A. ii.

The Thirties — The Approach to Oxford — Coaching Celebrities — The
Common Rooms — Then and Now — The Lost Art of Conver-
sation — Beaux Esprits and Belles — Marshall Hacker — Miss
Horseman.

THE evening of a prolonged life has its compen-
sations and its duties. It has its compensations :
the Elder, who, reverend like Shakespeare's Nestor
for his outstretched life, has attained through old
experience something of prophetic strain, reaps
keen enjoyment from his personal familiarity with
the days of yore, known to those around him
roughly from the page of history or not at all.
It has its duties : to hand on and to depict with
the fascinating touch of first-hand recollection the
incidents and action, the characteristics and the
scenery, of that vanished past, which in the retired
actor's memory still survives, but must scatter like
the Sybil's leaves should he pass off the stage un-
communicative and unrecording.

A

*i;- ' •REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

The nineteenth century, in the second intention
of the term, opens with the Thirties ; its first two
decades belong to and conclude an earlier epoch.
The Thirties saw the birth of railroads and of the
penny post ; they invented lucifer matches ; they
witnessed Parliamentary and Municipal reform, the
new Poor Law, the opening of London University ;
they hailed the accession of Victoria ; in them
Charles Dickens, Tennyson, Keble, Browning, John
Henry Newman, began variously to influence the
world ; while with Scott, Crabbe, Coleridge, Lamb,
Southey, all but a few patriarchs of the older
school of literature passed away. Men now
alive who were born, like myself, in the reign of
George IV., recall and can describe an England
as different from the England of our present
century as monarchic France under the Capets
differed from republican France to-day. Nowhere
was the breach with the past more sundering
than in Oxford. The University over which the
Duke of Wellington was installed as Chancellor in
1834 owned undissolved continuity with the Oxford
of Addison, Thomas Hearne, the Wartons, Bishop
Lowth ; the seeds of the changes which awaited it—
of Church movements, Museums and Art Galleries,
Local Examinations, Science Degrees, Extension
Lectures, Women's Colleges — germinating unsus-
pected while the old warrior was emitting his
genial false quantities in the Theatre, were to begin
their transforming growth before the period which
he adorned had found its close. The Oxford, then,
of the Thirties, its scenery and habits, its humours
and its characters, its gossip and its wit, shall be

OXFORD IN THE THIRTIES 3

first among the dry bones in the valley of forget-
fulness which I will try to clothe with flesh.

It was said in those days that the approach to
Oxford by the Henley Road was the most beautiful
in the world. Soon after passing Littlemore you
came in sight of, and did not lose again, the sweet
city with its dreaming spires, driven along a road
now crowded and obscured with dwellings, open
then to cornfields on the right, to uninclosed
meadows on the left, with an unbroken view of
the long line of towers, rising out of foliage less
high and veiling than after seventy more years
of growth to-day. At once, without suburban
interval, you entered the finest quarter of the
town, rolling under Magdalen Tower, and past
the Magdalen elms, then in full unmutilated luxu-
riance, till the exquisite curves of the High Street
opened on you, as you drew up at the Angel, or
passed on to the Mitre and the Star. Along that
road, or into Oxford by the St. Giles's entrance,
lumbered at midnight Pickford's vast waggons with
their six musically belled horses ; sped stage-coaches
all day long — Tantivy, Defiance, Rival, Regulator,
Mazeppa, Telegraph, Rocket, " a fast coach, which
performed the journey from Oxford to Birmingham
in seven hours," Dart, Magnet, Blenheim, and
some thirty more ; heaped high with ponderous
luggage and with cloaked passengers, thickly hung
at Christmas time with turkeys, with pheasants in
October ; their guards, picked buglers, sending be-
fore them as they passed Magdalen Bridge the
now forgotten strains of " Brignall Banks," "The
Troubadour," "I'd be a Butterfly," "The Maid

4 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

of Llangollen/' or " Begone, Dull care " ; on the
box their queer old purple - faced many - caped
drivers — Cheeseman, Steevens, Fowles, Charles
Homes, Jack Adams, and Black Will. This last
jehu, spending three nights of the week in Ox-
ford, four in London, maintained in both a home,
presided over by two several wives, with each of
whom he had gone through the marriage cere-
mony ; and had for many years — so distant was
Oxford then from London — kept each partner igno-
rant of her sister's existence. The story came out
at last ; but the wives seem not to have objected,
and it was the business of no one else ; indeed,
had he been indicted for bigamy, no Oxford jury
could have been found to convict Black Will.

The coaches were horsed by Richard Costar, as
great an original as any of his men ; he lived in
his picturesque house on the Cherwell, now con-
verted into Magdalen School, just opposite Mag-
dalen Turnpike, having two entrance gates, one
on each side of the pike, so that he could always
elude payment. I remember standing within his
railings to see the procession of royal carriages
which brought Queen Adelaide to Oxford in 1835.
She drove about in semi-state, attending New Col-
lege and Magdalen Chapels, lunching at Queen's,
and holding a court at the Angel. Opposite to her
in the carriage sat always the Duke of Wellington
in his gold-tasselled cap, more cheered and re-
garded than the quiet, plain-looking, spotty-faced
Queen. The Mayor of Oxford was an old Mr.
Wootten, brewer, banker, and farmer, dressed
always in blue brass-buttoned coat, cords, top-

OXFORD IN THE THIRTIES 5

boots, and powdered hair. He was told that he
must pay his respects to the Queen ; so he drove
to the Angel in his wonderful one-horse-chaise,
a vehicle in which Mr. and Mrs. Bubb might
have made their historic jaunt to Brighton, and
was introduced to her Majesty by the Chamber-
lain, Lord Howe. She held out her hand to be
kissed : the Mayor shook it heartily, with the saluta-
tion : " How d'ye do, marm ; how's the King ? "
I saw Queen Victoria two years afterwards pro-
claimed at Carfax ; and in the general election of
1837 I witnessed from the windows of Dr. Rowley,
Master of University, the chairing of the successful
candidates, Donald Maclean of Balliol, and William
Erie of New College, afterwards Chief Justice of
the Common Pleas. Erie rode in a fine open
carriage with four white horses ; Maclean was
borne aloft, as was the custom, in a chair on four
men's shoulders. Just as he passed University, I
saw a man beneath me in the crowd fling at him
a large stone. Maclean, a cricketer and athlete,
saw it coming, caught it, dropped it, and took off
his hat to the man, who disappeared from view in
the onset made upon him by the mob ; and, as
Bunyan says of Neighbour Pliable, I saw him no
more. Maclean was a very handsome man, owing
his election, it was said, to his popularity among
the wives of the electors ; he died insolvent and in
great poverty some years afterwards.

The University life was not without its brilliant
social side. The Heads of Houses, with their
families, formed a class apart, exchanging solemn
dinners and consuming vasty deeps of port ; but

6 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

the abler resident Fellows, the younger Professors,
and one or two notable outsiders, made up con-
vivial sets, with whose wit, fun, frolic, there is no
Comparison in modern Oxford. The Common
f Rooms to-day, as I am informed, are swamped
by shop ; while general society, infinitely extended
by the abolition of College celibacy, is correspond-
ingly diluted. Tutors and Professors are choked
with distinctions and redundant with educational
activity ; they lecture, they write, they edit, they
investigate, they athleticise, they are scientific or
theological or historical or linguistic ; they fulfil
presumably some wise end or ends. But one
accomplishment of their forefathers has perished
from among them — they no longer talk: the
Ciceronian ideal of conversation, a-TrovSatov ovSev,
<f>i\6\o<ya multa, "Not a word on shop, much on
literature," has perished from among them. In
the Thirties, conversation was a fine art, a claim
to social distinction : choice sprouts of the brain,
epigram, anecdote, metaphor, now nursed care-
fully for the printer, were joyously lavished on
one another by the men and women of those
bibulous, pleasant days, who equipped themselves
at leisure for the wit combats each late supper-
party provoked, following on the piquet, quadrille,
or whist, which was the serious business of
the evening. Their talk ranged wide ; their
scholarship was not technical but monumental ;
they were no philologists, but they knew their
authors — their authors, not classical only, but of
mediaeval, renaissant, modern, Europe. I re-
member how Christopher Erie, eccentric Fellow

OXFORD IN THE THIRTIES 7

of New College, warmed with more than ones
glass of ruby Carbonel, would pour out yEschylus,
Horace, Dante, by the yard. Staid Hammond of
Merton, son to Canning's secretary and biographer,
knew his Pope by heart, quoting him effectively
and to the point. Edward Greswell of Corpus,
whose quaint figure strode the streets always with
stick in one hand and umbrella in the other,
was a walking library of Greek and Latin inscrip-
tions.

A select few ladies, frank spinsters and jovial
matrons, added to the charm of these conviviali-
ties. Attired in short silk dresses — for Queen
Addy, as Lady Granville calls her, was proud of
her foot and ankle — sandal-shoes, lace tippets, hair
dressed in crisp or flowing curls, they took their
part in whist or at quadrille, this last a game I fear
forgotten now, bearing their full share in the Attic
supper-table till their sedan-chairs came to carry
them away. There was gay old Mrs. Neve, belle
of Oxford in her prime, living a widow now in
Beam Hall, opposite Merton, with seven card-
tables laid out sometimes in her not spacious
drawing-room. Mrs. Foulkes, whose husband, the
Principal of Jesus, walked the High Street always-
upon St. David's day with a large leek fastened in
the tassel of his cap, piqued herself on the style
and quality of her dress. She had a rival in Mrs.
Pearse, a handsome widow living in St. Giles' ; by
the aid of Miss Boxall, the fashionable milliner,
they vied with one another like Brunetta and
Phyllis in the Spectator. Famous, not for dress,
but for audacity and wit, was Rachel Burton,

8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

"Jack" Burton as she was called, daughter to a
Canon of Christchurch, whose flirtations with old
Blucher, on the visit of the allied sovereigns, had
amused a former generation, and who still survived
to recall and propagate anecdotes not always fit for
ears polite. Amongst her eccentricities she once
won the Newdigate : the judges, agreed upon the
poem which deserved the prize, broke the motto'd
envelope to find within the card of Miss Rachel
Burton. Her sister "Tom," married to Marshall
Hacker, vicar of Iffley, I knew well ; and I remem-
ber too the illustrious Jack, lodging in the corner
house of what was then called Coach and Horse
Lane, sunning herself on summer days without her
wig and in wild dishabille on a small balcony over-
looking the garden of a house in which I often
visited. A wild story, which being absolutely un-
true, does infinite credit to the inventive powers of
the generation that originated it, explained in my
time Mr. Marshall Hacker's double appellation.
His name was said to have been Marshall ; and he
was by profession a surgeon. His intimate friend
was injured while shooting, and Marshall ampu-
tated the wounded limb. The patient died, in
consequence, he believed, of unskilful treatment
under the knife. He bequeathed a fortune to the
operator, on condition that he should at once take
orders, becoming thereby precluded from pro-
fessional practice, and that he should assume the
surname of Hacker. It seemed to be one of those
stories which, as Charles Kingsley used to say, are
too good not to be true ; but I am bound to
destroy it : for I have learned that Mr. Marshall

OXFORD IN THE THIRTIES 9

was never a surgeon, and that he took the name of
Hacker on inheriting property descending to him
from an ancestress, sister to Colonel Hacker the
regicide, who married a Marshall in 1645.

Another of these vestals was Miss, or, as she
liked to be called, Mrs. Horseman, dressy and
made up, and posthumously juvenile, but retaining
something of the beauty which had won the heart
of Lord Holland's eldest son years before, when
at Oxford with his tutor Shuttleworth, until her
Ladyship took the alarm, swept down, and carried
him off; and had attracted admiring notice from
the Prince Regent in the Theatre, as she sat in
the Ladies' Gallery with her lovely sister, Mrs.
Nicholas. They came from Bath ; I have always
imagined their mother to be the " Mrs. Horseman,
a very old, very little, very civil, very ancient-
familied, good, quaint old lady," with whom Fanny
Burney spent an evening in I79I.1 Miss Horse-
man herself was a witty, well-bred, accomplished
woman. Her memory was an inexhaustible trea-
sure-house of all the apt sayings, comic incidents,
memorable personages of the past thirty years,
dispensed with gossip and green tea to her guests
round the little drawing-room of her house in
Skimmery Hall Lane, hung with valuable Claude
engravings in their old black frames. She outlived
her bright faculties, became childish, and wandered
in her talk, but to the last shone forth in all the
glaring impotence of dress, ever greeting me with
cordial welcome, and pathetically iterative anecdote.

1 Madame D'Arblay's " Diary," vol. v. p. 257.

10 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

She lies just outside St. Mary's Church ; I see her
grave through the railings as I pass along the
street. That is the final record of all those charm-
ing antediluvians ; " arl gone to churchyard," says
Betty Maxworthy in " Lorna Doone." La farce est
jouee^ tire le rideau ; — but it is something to recall
and fix the Manes Acheronte remissos.

CHAPTER II

ORIGINAL CHARACTERS

"/ am known to be a humorous patrician ; hasty and
tinder -like upon too trivial motion ; what I think I utter, and
spend my malice in my breath" — SHAKESPEARE.

Thomas Dunbar — Brasenose Ale — A famous Chess Club — Dunbar's
Impromptus — "Horse" Kett of Trinity — Oriel Oddities — Cople-
ston— Blanco White— Whately— Dr. Bull of Christchurch— The
Various Species of Dons— The Senior Fellow— Some Venerable
Waifs— Tom Davis— Dr. Ellerton of Magdalen — Rudd of Oriel
— Edward Quicke of New College — Dr. Frowd of Corpus — His
Vagaries as Preacher and Politician — A Brother Bedlamite —
" Mo " Griffith of Merton— His Quips and Cranks.

READERS who, like supercilious Mr. Peter MagnusTi
are not fond of anything original, had better skip
this chapter ; if, with young Marlow in " She
Stoops to Conquer," they can say more good-
naturedly, " He's a character, and I'll humour
him," let them persevere ; for I shall recall not
a few among the Oxford Characters of my early
recollections. They were common enough in
those days. Nature, after constructing an oddity,
was wont to break the mould ; and her more
roguish experiments stood exceptional, numerous,
distinct, and sharply denned. Nowadays, at
Oxford, as elsewhere, men seem to me to be
turned out by machinery ; they think the same
thoughts, wear the same dress, talk the same
shop, in Parliament, or Bar, or Mess, or Com- *

12 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

mon Room. Even in the Forties Characters were
becoming rare ; as the Senior Fellows of Corpus
and of Merton, Frowd and Mo. Griffith— two
oddities of whom I shall have something to say
later on — were one day walking together round
Christchurch Meadow, little Frowd was over-
heard lamenting that the strange Originals of
their younger days seemed to have vanished from
the skirts of Oxford knowledge ; but was con-
soled by Griffith— " Does it not occur to you,
Dr. Frowd, that you and I are the 'Characters'
of to-day?"

First in my list shall come Thomas Dunbar, of
Brasenose, keeper of the Ashmolean, poet, anti-
quary, conversationalist. Didbin, in his " Biblio-
graphical Decameron," congratulates Oxford on
Dunbar's appointment to the neglected museum,
which he cleansed, smartened, rearranged, res-
cuing from dust and moths the splendid twelfth-
century " Bestiarium " which Ashmole had placed
in the collection. His poems, vers de l} University
were handed about in manuscript, and are mostly
lost. I possess an amusing squib on " Brasenose
Ale," commemorating the else forgotten Brasenose
dons and city wine merchants of the day ; J with
an ode composed by him as Poet Laureate to a
famous chess club, whose minutes have passed
from my bookshelves to swell the unrivalled col-
lection of Mr. Madan, the accomplished Sub-
Librarian at the Bodleian.2 It was recited at an
anniversary dinner, where sat as invited guests

1 Appendix A. 2 Appendix B.

ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 13

Mr. Markland, of Bath ; Sir Christopher Pegge ;
porter-loving Dale of B.N.C. satirised in " Brase-
nose Ale " ; with Henry Matthews, author of the
"Diary of an Invalid."1 " It was a sumptuous
dinner," the minutes fondly record ; it began at
five o'clock, and must have continued till after
nine; for "Old Tom is tolling" is written on the
opposite page. The King's Arms, where it was
held, still stands ; but the delightful symposiasts,
with their powdered hair and shirt-frills, their
hessians or silk stockings, their sirloins and
eighteenth-century port, are gone to what Dunbar's
poem calls the Mansion of Hades. His, too, was
the lampoon on the two corpulent brothers, whose
names I will not draw from their dread abode.
Respectively a physician and a divine, they were
lazy and incapable in either function. This is
Dunbar's friendly estimate of the pair : —

Here D.D. toddles, M.D. rolls,
Were ever such a brace of noddies ?

D.U. has the cure of souls,
M.D. has the care of bodies.

Between them both what treatment rare

Our bodies and our souls endure ;
One has the cure without the care,

And one the care without the cure.2

1 Appendix C.

2 One of my critics claims these lines for Horace Smith, of
the "Rejected Addresses." They were ascribed to Dunbar
in my time ; are perhaps more likely to be by a man not
known beyond Oxford, than to one amongst those of wider
fame on whom at that time every unauthentic jeu tfesprit
was fathered.

14 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

But his most brilliant reputation was colloquial ;
sparkling with apt quotations and with pointed
well-placed anecdotes, he was especially happy in
his impromptus. Leaving England for the East,
the Club accredit him with a Latin letter, penned
by Gilbert, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, to
the Prince of the Faithful, as Grand Master of
Oriental chess-craft. He returns thanks in "a
warm and impressive Latin oration " ; and sud-
denly perceiving that the seal appended to the
commendatory epistle is enclosed in an oyster
shell, he exclaims, "Et in Graecia Ostracismum
Aristidi ostendam ! " One of the Heads of Houses
had four daughters — Mary, a don ; Lucy, a blue-
stocking ; Susan, a simpleton ; Fanny, a sweet
unaffected girl. Asked by Lucy the meaning of
the word alliteration, with scarcely a pause he
replied : —

Minerva-like majestic Mary moves ;
Law, Latin, logic, learned Lucy loves ;
Serenely silent, Susan's smiles surprise ;
From fops, from flatterers, fairest Fanny flies.

The "toast" of the day was a beautiful Miss
Charlotte Ness. She asked Dunbar the force of
the words abstract and concrete, which she had
heard in a University sermon. A few moments'
silence produced the following : —

Say, what is Abstract ? what Concrete ?

Their difference define. —
They both in one fair form unite,

And that fair form is thine. —

^^^^••BBBBBHBBH

AVJ

"HORSE" KETT

From a Portrait by Dighton

ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 15

How so ? this riddle pray undo. —

'Tis no hard-laboured guess,
For when I lovely Charlotte view,

I then view lovely Ness.

He was a man of good family, hovering between
London, Bath, and Oxford. A room in our house
at Oxford was within my memory known as Mr.
Dunbar's room. His walking-stick was handed
down to me, a serpent-twined caduceus, with the
names of the Nine Muses on the gold handle. Styx
novies interfusa he called it.

Contemporary with Dunbar was " Horse " Kett,
of Trinity. In his portrait by Dighton, here repro-
duced, the long face, dominated by the straight
bony nose, explains and justifies the epithet. He was
a man of considerable ability ; Bampton lecturer,
novelist ; and just missed the Poetry Professorship.
His Bampton Lectures of 1790, on the " Conduct
and opinions of the Primitive Christians," show a
historic insight surprising for that period. His
critical powers were acknowledged by De Quincy,
who referred to him the once burning, now for-
gotten, question of the plagiarism in White's Bamp-
ton Lectures. White had been assisted in their
composition by Parr, by Parsons, Master of Balliol,
by a Dr. Gabriel of Bath, and by a dissenting
minister, Mr. Badcock. Kett, called in to arbitrate
and reconcile, reprimanded the accomplices all
round. But his repute was due to his strange equine
face, inspiring from the seniors jokes in every learned
language, and practical impertinences from the less
erudite youngsters. When his back was turned in
lecture, the men filled his snuff-box with oats. Dr.

1 6 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Kidd used to relate how, attending him in his rooms
for some ailment, he heard a strange rattle in the
letter-box of the outer door : " Only a note (an
oat)," said the good-natured victim. Walter Savage
Landor tried on him his prentice hand —

" The Centaur is not fabulous," says Young.1

Had Young known Kett,
He'd say, " Behold one, put together wrong ;

The head is horseish, but, what yet
Was never seen in man or beast,
The rest is human — or, at least,
Is Kett."

He published a book which he called tl Logic
Made Easy," puffing himself on the title page as a
public University Examiner. It was a dialogue
between a father and his motherless daughter
Emily ; was a feeble production and filled with
blunders. A pamphlet from Copleston's pen, en-
titled "The Examiner Examined," scourged it with
merciless severity ; and bore as its motto —

Aliquis latet error ; Equo ne credite, Teucri ;

a stroke of personal impertinence better perhaps
omitted. Dunbar, too, had ready his possibly pre-
meditated impromptu. Some one asked him who
were the Proctors in a certain year : they were
Darnel, of Corpus, and Kett. Dunbar answered —

Infelix Lolium et steriles dominantur Avence.

1 A book notable in its day.—" Young (E.) ' The Centaur not
Fabulous, in Six Letters to a Friend on " The Life in Vogue," '
8vo, copperplate front., symbolic of the public's careless gaiety,
calf, 35. 6d., 1755." The parody on Byron in the "Rejected
Addresses " contains the line " Centaurs (not fabulous) these
rules efface."

ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 17

The mention of Copleston carries one to Oriel/]
peopled at that time with "characters" of a very
exalted type. Copleston, substantial, majestic,
"richly coloured," as T. Mozley calls him, was
Provost ; a man not without asperities of mind and
manner — we recall his rudeness to J. H. Newman,
dining in Hall as a newly-elected Fellow : — but, as
a man of the world, in London society, regular con-
tributor to the Quarterly Review, author of widely-
read and accepted pamphlets on currency and
finance, he held absolute ascendancy amongst the
higher class of University men, and filled his College
with Fellows strangely alien to the port and pre-
judice, the clubbable whist-playing somnolence,
which Gibbon first, then Sydney Smith, found
characteristic of Oxford society. I saw him only
once, as Bishop of Llandaff ; but his mien and
presence were carefully preserved and copied by
old Joseph Parker, the bookseller, who resembled
him curiously in face and voice, and, in a suit of
formal black, with frill at the breast and massive
gold seals pendent from the fob, imitated his walk
and manner. He carried on at Oriel the innova-
tion of his predecessor, Provost Eveleigh, who had
forced on a reluctant University the Public Exa-
mination for a B.A. degree;1 and who gave his
Fellowships not so much to technical attainment
as to evidence of intellectual capacity ; to Copleston
himself, to Whately, Keble, Davison, Hawkins, I

Vl The first Public Examination was held in 1802. Two men
were placed in the First Class : Abel Hendy, who died in 1808 ;
John Mariiott, the friend of Walter Scott, who dedicated to him
the Second Canto of " Marmion.''

B

1 8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

j Hampden, Arnold; men who formed in Oxford
what was known as the Noetic School, maintaining
around them a continuing dialectical and mental fer-
ment. Tommy Short used to say that Davison and
Whately habitually crammed for after-dinner talk ;
and unfortunate outlanders, whose digestion of the
dinner and enjoyment of the port wine was spoiled
by it, complained that Oriel Common Room stunk
of logic. A country clergyman once, after listening
to Whately' s talk throughout the evening, thanked
him formally for the pains he had taken to instruct
him. "Oh, no," said Whately, "not instruct; I did
not mean to be didactic ; but one sometimes likes
having an anvil on which to beat out one's thoughts."
Amongst them too was Blanco White — Hyperion
they called him, as Copleston was Saturn — adopted
not only into Oriel, but into English society and
the English Church. He is believed to have not
written, but inspired Hampden's famous Bampton
Lectures : an old survivor of those days, Canon
Hinds Howell, White's pupil at the time, told me
how day after day for months before they were
delivered Hampden was closeted with Blanco.
Whately was a prominent Oxford figure, with bla-
tant voice, great stride, rough dress. I remember
my mother's terror when he came to call. She had
met him in the house of newly-married Mrs. Baden-
Powell, who had filled her drawing-room with the
spider-legged chairs just then coming into fashion.
On one of these sat Whately, swinging, plunging,
and shifting on his seat while he talked. An omin-
ous crack was heard ; a leg of the chair had given

• way; he tossed it on to the sofa without comment,

ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 19

and impounded another chair. The history of the '
Noetic school has not been written ; its interest was
obscured by the reactionary movement on which so,
many pens have worked.

I cross, for the present only, from Oriel to
Christchurch, and encounter sailing out of Peck-
water a very notable Canon of "the House/' Dr.
Bull. Tall, portly, handsome, beautifully dressed
and groomed — he was known as Jemmy Jessamy
in his youth — I hail him as type of the ornamental
Don. For of Dons there were four kinds. There
was the cosmopolitan Don ; with a home in Oxford,
but conversant with select humanity elsewhere ;
like Addison and Prior in their younger days, Tom
Warton in the Johnsonian era, Philip Duncan in
my recollection ; at home in coffee house, club,
theatre ; sometimes in Parliament, like Charles
Neate ; sometimes at Court, like William Bathurst
of All Souls, Clerk to the Privy Council. There
was the learned Don, amassing a library, editing
Latin authors and Greek plays, till his useful career
was extinguished under an ill-placed, ill-fitting
mitre. There was the meer Don, as Sir Thomas
Overbury calls him ; Head of a House commonly
as the resultant of a squabble amongst the electing
Fellows, with a late-married wife as uncouth and
uneducated as himself, forming with a few affluent
saddles an exclusive, pompous, ignorant, lazy set,
"respecting no man in the University, and re-
spected by no man out of it." Lastly, the orna-
mentalDon ; representative proxenus to distinguished
strangers, chosen as Proctor or Vice-Chancellor
against a probable Installation or Royal visit.

20 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Bull played this part to perfection, as did Dr.
Wellesley in the next generation. He had gained
his double first and kindred decorations as a
young man, but promotion early and plural lighted
on his head, promotion, not to posts which tax
and generate effort, but to cushioned ease of
canonries ; and he dropped into the manager of
Chapter legislations and surveyor of College pro-
perties ; a butterfly of the most gorgeous kind,
a Morpho, such as dear old Westwood used to
unveil before visitors to his museum, yet still only
a butterfly. He was a man of pluck and deter-
mination ; his overthrow of redoubtable Bishop
Philpotts was immortalised by a delightful cartoon
in an early Punch — a bishop tossed by a bull ;
he had the manner of a royal personage ; you
must follow his lead and accept his dicta; but
he was a generous, kindly Dives, of a day when
Lazarus had not come to the front with unem-
ployed and democratic impeachments, to drop
flies into the fragrant ointment, to insinuate
scruples as to the purple and fine linen, to predict
the evolutionary downfall of those who toil not
neither spin. He would be impossible at the
present day, and perhaps it is just as well. He
was Canon of Christchurch, Canon of Exeter,
Prebendary of York, and held the good College
living of Staverton, all at once : —

" On the box with Will Whip, ere the days of the Rail,
To London I travelled ; and inside the mail
Was a Canon of Exeter ; on the same perch
Was a Canon of Oxford's Episcopal Church.
Next came one who held — I will own the thing small —
In the Minster of York a prebendary stall.

ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 21

And there sate a Parson, all pursy and fair,

With a Vicarage fat and five hundred a year.

Now, good reader, perhaps you will deem the coach full ?

No— there was but one traveller — DOCTOR JOHN BULL ! "

An oddiiypar excellence was the " Senior Fellow " :
an oddity then, a palaeozoic memory now. He
vanished with the Forties ; Railways, New Museums,
University Commissions, were too much for him.
He was no mere senior, primus inter pares only
in respect of age ; he was exceptional, solitary,
immemorial ; in the College but not of it ; left
stranded by a generation which had passed ; a great
gulf in habits, years, associations, lay between the
existing Common Room and himself. He mostly
lived alone ; the other men treated him deferen-
tially and called him Mister ; he met them in Hall
on Gaudy days and was sometimes seen in Chapel ;
but no one ever dropped in upon him, smoked
with him, walked with him ; he was thought to
have a history ; a suspicion of disappointment
hung over him ; he lived his own eccentric, friend-
less life, a victim to superannuation and celibacy.

Not a few of these venerable waifs come back to
me from early years. There was old Tom Davies,
Senior Fellow of Jesus, visible every day from
3 to 4 P.M., when he walked alone in all weathers
twice round Christchurch meadow. He was the
finest judge of wine in Oxford — "the nose of
kaut-go4t and the tip of taste" — could, it was
believed, tell a vintage accurately by the smell.
Joyous was the Common Room steward who
could call in his judgment to aid in the purchase
of pipe or butt. He refused all the most valuable

22 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

College livings in turn, because the underground
cellars of their parsonages were inadequate ; lived
and died in his rooms, consuming meditatively,
like Mr. Tulkinghorn, a daily cob-webbed bottle
of his own priceless port.

There was old Dr. Ellerton, Senior Fellow of
Magdalen, who used to totter out of Chapel with
the President on a Sunday. I have seen a laugh-
able sketch of the pair, as Shuttleworth, Warden of
New College, a dexterous caricaturist, spied them
from his window shuffling along New College Lane
to a^convocation. Coaevals they appeared, but Routh
was really the senior by ten years. As time went
on, Routh's intellect survived his friend's ; he came
to shake his wig at the mention of Ellerton's name;
and say, " he is grown old and foolish, sir." He was
a mild Hebrew scholar, and is embalmed as co-
founder with Dr. Pusey of the small annual prize
known as the Pusey and Ellerton Scholarship. His
rooms were at the corner of the quadrangle, looking
on to the deer park and the great plane tree. He
was a picturesquely ugly man ; the gargoyle above
his window was a portrait, hardly an exaggeration,
of his grotesque old face. Years before, when the
building was restored and he was College tutor, the
undergraduates had bribed the sculptor to fashion
there in stone the visage of their old Damcetas ; he
detected the resemblance, and insisted angrily on
alteration. Altered the face was : cheeks and
temples hollowed, jaw-lines deepened, similitude
for the time effaced. But gradually the unkind
invisible chisel of old age worked upon his own
octogenarian countenance ; his own cheek was

ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 23

hollowed, his own jaw contracted, till the quaint
projecting mask became again a likeness even more
graphic than before.

I remember old Mr. Rudd, Senior Fellow of Oriel
since 1819, who appeared always at the Gaudy in
black shorts and silk stockings, travelling up from
Northampton in a fly, and spending two days on
the journey. Then I knew Edward Quicke, of New
College, whose one lingering senile passion was for
tandem-driving ; the famous " Arter-Xerxes " story
had its source in his groom and him. Twice a day
he might be seen, sitting melancholy behind his
handsome pair along the roads round Oxford. He
died, I may say, in harness ; for one dark night in
the vacation he was run down near Woodstock
by two scouts, and succumbed in a few days to his
injuries. With him was old Eastwick, who after
spending some years, poor fellow, in a lunatic
asylum, reappeared to end his days in College.
He had once, we supposed, been young ; had lived
and loved and gathered rosebuds ; had certainly
begun life as a briefless barrister. At a Gaudy
dinner once sardonic Shuttleworth congratulated
him " on an accession to his income." " I beg your

pardon, Mr. Warden, I was not aware " "Oh !

I beg yours, but I was told that you had left o
going circuit." He came back from durance vile a
quiet, watery-eyed, lean old man, looking like a
scarecrow in good circumstances, dining in Hall,
where he was mostly silent, yet broke out curiously
sometimes with reminiscences, forbodings, protests ;
spent the livelong day in eradicating dandelions
from the large grass-plat in the front quadrangle,

24 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

his coat-tails falling over his shoulders as he stooped,
and leaving him, like the poor Indian of the parody,
" bare behind." Once more there was old Maude,
of Queen's, one of the detenus as they were called —
the ten thousand English tourists seized brutally by
Napoleon when war was suddenly declared in 1803,
and kept in prison till his abdication. Maude came
back to Oxford, eleven years of his life wiped out
and his contemporaries passed away, to live alone
in his old-fashioned, scantily furnished rooms, where
I remember his giving me breakfast in my school-
days and quoting to me Dr. Johnson's "Vanity
of Human Wishes."

These were curios of no great native force —
spectacular oddities merely ; two more remain,
whose amusing outbreaks of indecorum and forcible
gifts of speech deserve a longer notice : Dr. Frowd,
of Corpus, and " Mo." Griffith, of Merton. Frowd
was a very little man, an irrepressible, unwearied
chatterbox, with a droll interrogative face, a bald
shining head, and a fleshy under-lip, which he could
push up nearly to his nose. He had been chaplain
to Lord Exmouth, and was present at the bom-
bardment of Algiers. As the action thickened he
was seized with a comical religious frenzy, dashing
round the decks, and diffusing spiritual exhortation
amongst the half-stripped, busy sailors, till the first
lieutenant ordered a hencoop to be clapped over
him, whence his little head emerging continued its
devout cackle, quite regardless of the balls which
flew past him and killed eight hundred sailors in
our small victorious fleet. Lord Exmouth rescued
him from this incarceration, and to keep him out of

ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 25

mischief set him to unload and pack a large crate of
port wine, presenting him with three dozen for him-
self. This gift was his pride through life ; very rarely
drunk, but boasted of to every guest in Common
Room. At his death his will bequeathed to the
Rev. George Hext, a brother Fellow, " all my wine
in Corpus College cellars." It amounted only to
seven surviving bottles of the famous port ; the
deprome quadrimum must have been repeated more
frequently than was supposed. He was a preacher
of much force and humour, if only one had the self-
possession risum tenere. I heard him once in St.
Clement's Church deliver a sermon on Jonah, which
roused up his congregation quite as effectually as the
shipmaster wakened the sleepy prophet. " There's
a man in this church who never says his prayers :
lies down at night, rises in the morning, without a
word of gratitude or adoration for the God who
made him and has preserved him. Now, I have a
message to that man — what meanest thou, O thou
sleeper ? arise," &c., &c. " Hell," he began another
time, with a knowing wag of his droll head, " Hell
is a place which men believe to be reserved for
those who are a great deal worse than themselves."
Presently he became husky, drew out a lozenge
and sat down in the pulpit to masticate it leisurely,
while we looked at one another, wished that we had
lozenges, and awaited the consumption of his lubri-
cant. In reading chapters from the Old Testament,
he used to pause at a marginal variation, read it to
himself half audibly, and, like Dr. Blimber, smile on
it auspiciously or knit his brow and shake his head
in disapproval. I remember too his preaching in All

26 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Saints Church, of which Thompson, afterwards
rector of Lincoln, was incumbent. He climbed up
the steep three-decker steps into the high-walled
pulpit, and disappeared, till, his hands clinging
to the desk and his comical face peering over
it, he called down into the reading desk below,
" Thompson, send up a hassock." A College living
was offered to him : and a funeral being due, he
went down to bury the dead and survey the place.
Arrived at the nearest railway station, he found no
conveyance except a carriage which had just de-
posited a wedding party. Into this he jumped —
coachman, whip, horses, being all decked with
favours — met the mournful procession, and finding
the churchyard path muddy, climbed on the white-
ribboned driver's back, and was borne to the church
in front of the coffin amid the cheers and laughter
of the amateur onlookers, who in the country as-
semble always at these instructive functions. He
accepted the living after this escapade, but the
College refused to present him, and were sustained
on his appeal to the Visitor. To another prank
they were unjustifiably lenient. A contested election
of a member for the University was proceeding, the
excitement high and the voting close. Frowd
paired with four men against one of the candidates,
then went up and voted. A London club would
have expelled a man for such a feat ; but Frowd
seems to have been looked upon as a chartered
libertine, and the offence was passed over on receipt
of an unintelligibly remorseful letter — "You have
from me a poenitet in duodecimo and a habes con-
fitentem reum in quarto " — with a request, however,

ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 27

that he would absent himself from the College for a
twelvemonth. His rooms were on the second floor
looking out into the meadow ; in the room below
him lived Holme, a more advanced Bedlamite even
than himself, a pleasant fellow as I remember him
in his interlunar periods, but who died, I believe, in
an asylum. Frowd used to take exercise on wet
days by placing chairs at intervals round his room
and jumping over them. Holme, a practical being,
one day fired a pistol at his ceiling while these
gymnastics were proceeding, and the bullet whizzed
past Frowd, who, less unconcerned than at Algiers,
ran downstairs, put his head into the room, and
cried, " Would you, bloody-minded man, would
you ? " The feeling in the Common Room was
said to be regret that the bullet had not been
billeted ; Frowd would have ceased to exasperate,
Holme would have been incarcerated or hanged,
the College rid of both.

Moses Griffith was son to a physician of the same
name. In the hospital where the father practised
a particular kind of poultice was long known as
a "mogriff." The son, objecting to the nickname
" Mo," obtained the royal licence to bear the name
of Edwards, gradually dropping the Moses and the
final letter s, and appearing in the later University
Calendar as Edward Griffith ; but though gods
might call him Edward, mortals called him " Mo."
Twice in the year he was compelled to sign his true
name on receiving a dividend ; and it was not well
to go near him at those times. He was much more
than an oddity — a real wit, racy in ironical talk,
prompt in bitter or diverting repartee. In younger

28 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

days he was Whitehall Preacher, an appointment
then made for life ; but became so tedious as time
passed that the Bishop of London, Howley, called
on him to suggest his retirement. He was over-
powered by Mo's formal politeness, and came away
discomfited ; and Griffith remained until Blom-
field, succeeding to the bishopric, dismissed all the
preachers, and replaced the best of them under
fresh rules, mainly in order to get rid of Mo.1 If
you wished to rouse his anger, you had only to men-
tion Bishop Blomfield, who had thus righteously
deposed him from his Whitehall preachership.
" Sir, he was born a blackguard ; he's a Bury St.
Edmund's blackguard, and he'll die a blackguard."
Blomfield's father kept a school at Bury, and the
future Bishop was there born, and was educated at
the Grammar School. Mo. disliked the free use of
oaths in conversation : one of the Senior Fellows,

W , retained this fault of his blood, as Queen

Elizabeth called it, rather too faithfully ; his every
sixth or seventh word began with the letter D.
Bishop Hobhouse, lately dead — laus illi debetur et a
me gratia maior — remembered Griffith one day fol-
lowing W out of the Common Room, and call-
ing through his door : " Mr. W , Mr. W ,

Walter Kerr says he won't dine in Hall if you
continue to swear." Walter Kerr Hamilton was
Denison's Curate at St. Peter's, and afterwards
Bishop of Salisbury. But Mo. was not quite free
from the habit himself ; I was told by Archdeacon
Bree that, returning one day from a powerful

1 A history of the Whitehall preacherships is given in the
Appendix S.

ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 29

sermon at St. Mary's against profane swearing, he

was overheard saying to himself, " I'm d d if I

ever swear again." W was a curious survival ;

a little, made-up old man, with the habits and the
talk of long-ago West End clubs, attired always
for evening dress in a satin scarf and a finely
embroidered waistcoat. Going once to preach at
Wolvercot, Mo. took with him William Karslake, a
young Fellow of the College, who had found favour
in his eyes. " How did you like my sermon, sir ? "
was the first question, as they walked through the
fields homewards. "A very fine sermon, Mr.
Griffith ; perhaps a little above the audience."
"Audience, my friend. I suppose these dear
young turnip-tops would understand my sermon
as readily as those rustics. Sir, that was a White-
hall sermon." He sometimes read the service at
Holywell, a Merton living. The lesson happened
to be the third chapter of St. Luke. Griffith read
on till he came to the formidable pedigree at the
end. " Which was the son of Heli," he began ;
then, glancing at the genealogical Banquo-line
which follows — " the rest concerns neither you
nor me, so here endeth the Second Lesson." He
used to attend the St. Mary's afternoon service.
A prolonged University sermon had retarded the
parish service, and it was near five o'clock when
Copeland, who sometimes preached for Newman,
approached the pulpit. He was stopped in the
aisle by Griffith, who said in one of his stentorian
asides, " I am grieved to quit you, Mr. Copeland,
but Merton College dines at five."

He spent the Oxford term-times usually at Bath

30 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

— " City of Balls and Beggars " he was wont to
superscribe his letters thence — hating the sight of
the Philistines, as he called the undergraduates.
" Fetch a screen, Manciple," he said one day, when
dining alone in Hall he beheld a belated solitary
scholar who had not gone down ; but he resided in
the vacations, and always attended College meet-
ings. The late Warden, I have heard, used to relate
that when he was candidate for a Fellowship and
Griffith came up to vote, his colleagues tried to
impress upon him the duty of awarding the Fellow-
ship according to the examiners' verdict. " Sir,"
said Mo., " I came here to vote for my old friend's
son, and vote for him I shall, whatever the exa-
miners may say." He would sometimes bring a
guest to the College dinner, watching anxiously
over his prowess with the knife and fork. Ab-
stemiousness he could not abide : Dr. Wootten, an
Oxford physician, dined with him one day, and did
scant justice to the dishes: " My maxim, Mr. Griffith,
is to eat and leave off hungry." Mo. threw up his
hands as he was wont : " Eat and leave off hungry !
Why not wash and leave off dirty ? " So often as a
haunch of venison was announced for the high
table, he would invite my father, a renowned diner-
out in former days, but made domestic by tarda
podagra. I remember his exit once, fuming at my
father's refusal. " My friend," laying hand upon
his sleeve, " you will eat mutton till the wool grows
out of your coat." Once, at a large party in our
house, good-natured, loquacious Mrs. Routh, the
President of Magdalen's wife, addressed him.
" Mr. Griffith, do you ever take carriage exercise ;

ORIGINAL CHARACTERS 31

rive in a fly, I mean ? " " Madam, I thank God
I am not quite such a blackguard." He used to
ask me to his rooms when I was a boy, and regale
me with strawberries. He would make me recite
poetry to him— the " Elegy," " Sweet Auburn,"
" The Traveller," which I knew by heart — rewarding
me with presents of books ; on one occasion with a
fine set of Pope's " Homer " in eleven volumes,
bearing the bookplate of Edward Griffith. Much
later, and shortly before his death, I met him at a
Merton dinner. Edmund Hobhouse had brought
Sir Benjamin Brodie. "Who is that gentleman ?"
asked Griffith in his sonorous whisper. He was
told. A pause, during which Mo. glared at the
great surgeon; then the word " Butcher!" was
heard to hiss along the table. He comes before me

Bin an unbrushed beaver hat, a black coat and waist-
coat, nankeen trousers, and low shoes, with a vast
interval of white stocking. Requiescat in Pace!

CHAPTER III

PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE

" We will be wise in time: what though our ivork
Be fashioned in despite of their ill- service.
Be crippled every way ? ' Twere little praise
Did full resources wait on our good will
At every turn. Let all be as it is."

— BROWNING.

Dr. Daubeny— His Physic Garden — His Monkeys and their Eman-
cipation— A Pioneer of Science — Buckland and his Friends —
His Wife — His Lectures — A Scotch Sceptic and how he was
Silenced — The Buckland Menage — The Buckland Collection in
the Oxford Museum — Baden-Powell — Thomas, the Holywell
Glazier — Chapman, the Discoverer of Cetiosaurus.

PRESCIENTIFIC unquestionably : in the Thirties
the Oxford mind was inscient ; its attitude first
contemptuous, then hostile, towards the science
that, invita Minerva, was hatching in its midst ; a
strange, new, many-headed, assertive thing, claim-
ing absurdly to take rank with the monopolist
Humanities of Donland, not altogether without
concealed intent to challenge and molest the
ancient, solitary reign of its theology. Yet science
none the less there was, sustained by at least
three famous names, making possible the Phillips,
Brodie, Rolleston of a later date. Its first repre-
sentative of note was Daubeny ; Doctor, not Pro-
fessor, Daubeny ; Professor as a titular prefix
< came in much later ; came, I am told, through

DR. DAUBENY

From a Photograph taken in 1860

PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 33

ie Scottish Universities, which had borrowed it
from Germany. First Class and Fellow of Mag-
dalen, he early forsook practice as a physician
to devote himself to pure science ; as a pupil of
Jameson, Professor of Geology at Edinburgh, he
studied, fifty years before his time, what is now
known and valued as " Petrology " ; became widely
known by his works on the " Atomic Theory" and
on " Volcanic Action " ; and when Dr. Williams
died in 1834, succeeded him as professor of
chemistry, botany, rural economy, taking up his
abode in the house built newly at the entrance
to Magdalen bridge. He lectured, experimented,
wrote ; his books on Roman husbandry, and on
the trees and shrubs of the ancients, are still in-
valuable to the Virgilian scholar ; he carried out
elaborately and with improved devices Pouchet's
experiments on spontaneous generation, was the
first to welcome and extend in England Schon-
bein's discovery of ozone. His chemistry lectures
were a failure ; he lacked physical force, sprightli-
ness of manner, oral readiness, and his demonstra-
tions invariably went wrong. But his lectures drew
many noted University men ; Pusey, Whately, Tait,
Thomson, Charles Neate, Mark Pattison, Liddell,
Acland, Ruskin, Frank Buckland, are all inscribed
in his Pupil-book, which the College still preserves. \
He lavished care and money on his " Physic
Garden," introducing De Candolle's system side
by side with the old Linnaean beds, building new
and spacious houses, in which flourished the
Victoria lily, to be seen elsewhere for a long time
only at Kew and Chatsworth, and where the aloe

C

34 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

produced its one bloom of the century, its great
raceme rising in seven days to the height of four-
and-twenty feet. He cared little for outdoor
plants, and could not condescend to rudimentary
teaching ; educational botany, prospering at Cam-
bridge under Henslow, took no hold of Oxford.
But it was pleasant to walk with him round the
garden, and to hear his disquisitions on the Scam-
mony and Christ's Thorn, the Weeping Willow
from Pope's Twickenham Garden, the Paestum Rose,
the Birthwort from Godstow ruins, the Mandrake
under the Conservatory wall, the Sibthorpia and
Orontium in the little copper cisterns long swept
away : and happily, the garden was for nearly
eighty years in the care of the two Baxters, father
and son, both of them amongst the best exponents
in England of our native Flora. Their assiduity
and knowledge resulted in a collection of hardy
growths, exceptional in healthiness and size,
arranged with little rigidity of system, but, with
deference to each plant's idiosyncrasies, in spots
which the experimental tenderness of near a cen-
tury showed to be appropriate. They laboured
for a posterity which hastened to undo their work.
New brooms swept the unique old garden clean ;
young men arose who knew not Joseph ; young
men in a hurry to produce a little Kew upon the
incongruous Cherwell banks,

Parvam Trojam, simulataque magnis
Pergama, et arentem Xanthi cognomine rivum.

So the time-honoured array was broken up, Baxter
fits cashiered, the Linnaean borders razed, the

PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 35

monumental plants uprooted. Thus I wrote in
1900 ; but better times have followed. The
disaster has been repaired by the assiduity, zeal,
knowledge, of the present professor, and his
accomplished assistant Mr. W. G. Baker ; and
the garden is again amongst the most delightful
spots in Oxford.

One of Daubeny's fads was a collection of
monkeys, which he kept in a cage let into the
Danby gateway. One night the doors were forced
and the monkeys liberated, to be captured next
day wandering dismal on the Iffley road, or
perched crepitantes dentibus, on the railings in
Rose Lane. The culprit was not known at the
time ; it was mad Harry Wilkins, of Merton, who
had sculled up the river after dark and so gained
access to the locked-up gardens. Daubeny was
pained by the foolish insult, and the menagerie
was dispersed. He was genial and chatty in
society ; in College Hall, or at evening parties,
which he much frequented, we met the little, droll,
spectacled, old-fashioned figure, in gilt-buttoned
blue tail coat, velvet waistcoat, satin scarf, kid
gloves too long in the fingers, a foot of bright
bandanna handkerchief invariably hanging out be-
hind. Or we encountered him on Sunday after-
noons, in doctor's hood and surplice, tripping up
the steps which led to the street, shuffling into
Chapel, always late ; cross old Mundy, the College
porter, dispossessing some unfortunate stranger to
make way for him in the stalls. But with all his
retirement he did his work as a witness to the
necessity of science ; pleaded in pamphlets, letters,

36 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

speeches, for its introduction into the University
course, pressed on his own College successfully
the establishment of science scholarships, helped
on the time when, not in the Thirties, scarcely in
the Forties, the hour and the man should come.
He lived into old age, active to the last. Shortly
before his death he visited me in Somersetshire,
to meet his former schoolfellow, Lord Taunton.
The two old men had not seen each other since
they slept in the same room at Winchester fifty-
five years before, along with one of the Barings,
and Ford, author afterwards of the if Handbook
to Spain." It was pleasant to hear the chirping
reminiscences of the successful veterans, boys once
again together. He died in 1867, and lies at rest
beneath the stone pulpit in the Chapel court.
A memorial tablet in the antechapel bears a
Latin epitaph from the scholarly pen of his old
friend John Rigaud. Ever I take off my hat
when I pass his not forgotten grave, and pause,
like Old Mortality, to clear encroaching moss from
the letters which perpetuate his name.
f~~ The second savant of the time was Buckland,
and there was certainly no overlooking him.
Elected Fellow of Corpus in 1809, he gave his
whole time for ten years to the fossil-hunting
begun by him in the Winchester chalkpits as a
boy, not then reduced into a science; till in 1819
the Prince Regent, at the instance of Sir Joseph
Banks, created a professorship of geology, and
nominated Buckland to the post. His lecture-
room in the Ashmolean filled at once, not so much
with undergraduates as with dons, attracted by

PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE

37

lis liveliness and the novelty of his subject. The
Chancellor, Lord Grenville, visiting Oxford, sat
beside and complimented him ; Howley, afterwards
Archbishop, Sir Philip Egerton, so famous later as
a collector, were among his devotees; Whately,
Philip Duncan, Shuttleworth, pelted their friend
with playful squibs : " Some doubts," wrote Shuttle-
worth,

" Some doubts were once expressed about the Flood,
Buckland arose, and all was clear as — mud."

j

Alarms about the Deluge had not yet been'
generally awakened ; in his early works, Reliquia
Diluviancz and Vindicice Geologicce, he posed as
orthodox and reconcilist ; it was not till 1836 that
his Bridgewater Treatise roused the heresy-hunters,
that a hurricane of private and newspaper protests
whistled round his disregarding head, that Dean
Gaisford thanked God on his departure for Italy —
"We shall hear no more of his geology" — that
Pusey organised a protest against the conferring
a degree on Owen, and Keble clenched a bitter
argument by the conclusive dogma that "when
God made the stones He made the fossils in them."
Worse was still to come ; the " Six Days " were
to be impeached ; the convenient formula " be-
fore the Flood " to be dispossessed ; the old cos-
mogony which puzzled Mr. Ephraim Jenkinson
to fade slowly from the popular mind, reposing
as a curiosity, where it still occasionally survives,
amid the mental furniture of the country clergy :
and in the great awakening of knowledge which
severed theology from science and recast Biblical ]

38 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

criticism he was amongst the earliest and most
^energetic pioneers. The Clergy, the Dons, the
Press, fell upon him all together ; " Keep the St.
James' Chronicles," wrote to him his wife, " every-
one of which has a rap at you ; but I beseech
you not to lower your dignity by noticing news-
paper statements." Wise words ! which not every
wife would unreservedly emit. Without her moral
aid and intellectual support Buckland would not
so lightly and so confidently have faced his diffi-
culties and achieved his aims. An accomplished
mineralogist before their marriage, she threw her
whole nature into her husband's work. She de-
ciphered and transcribed his horribly illegible
papers, often adding polish to their style ; and her
skilful fingers illustrated many of his books. Night
after night while his Bridgewater Treatise was
in making, she sat up writing from his dictation
till the morning sun shone through the shutters.
From her came the first suggestion as to the true
character of the lias coprolites. When, at two
o'clock in the morning, the idea flashed upon him
that the Cheirotherium footsteps were testudinal,
he woke his wife from sleep ; she hastened down
to make pie crust upon the kitchen table, while
he fetched in the tortoise from the garden ; and
the pair soon saw with joint delight that its im-
pressions on the paste were almost identical with
those upon the slabs. Genial as a hostess, sympa-
thetic as a friend, she was not less exemplary as
a mother. Her children, departed and surviving,
called and call her blessed : "As good a man and
wife," wrote Frank Buckland of his parents, "as

PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE

39

ever did their duty to God and their fellow-
creatures." " Never," says her daughter, "was a
word of evil speaking permitted. ' My dear, edu-
cated people always talk of things, not persons;
it is only in the servants' hall that people gossip.' " l
He was a wonderful lecturer, clear, fluent, apt,
overflowing with witty illustrations, dashing down
amongst us ever and anon to enforce an intricate
point with Samsonic wielding of a cave-bear jaw
or a hyaena thigh bone. Of questions from his
hearers he was intolerant ; they checked the rapids
of his talk. " It would seem," queried a sceptical
Caledonian during a lecture in North Britain,
"that your animals always walked in one direc-
tion?" "Yes," was the reply, " Cheirotherium
was a Scotchman, and he always travelled south."

Even more attractive than the lectures at the
Clarendon were the field days ; the ascent of Shot-
over, with pauses at each of its six deposits, the
lumps of Montlivalvia hammered out from the
coralline oolite, the selenite crystals higher up,
the questionings over the ironsand on the summit,
over the ochre and pipeclay on the rough moor-
land long since ploughed into uninteresting fer-
tility. These are undergraduate memories ; but I
recall much earlier days, when I was wont to play
with Frank Buckland and his brother in their
home at the corner of Tom Quad : the entrance
hall with its grinning monsters on the low stair-

1 An unconscious echo of Plato : " de£ irepl avOptiiruv roi>j
\6yovs iroiov/j.ei>ovs, TJKiffTa QiXoffoQig, irptirov Troiovvras" " Ever
chattering about persons, a proceeding quite inconsistent with
philosophy." — Republic, vi. 12.

40 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

case, of whose latent capacity to arise and fall
upon me I never quite overcame my doubts ; the
side-table in the dining-room covered with fossils,
"Paws off" in large letters on a protecting card;
the very sideboard candlesticks perched on saurian
vertebrae ; the queer dishes garnishing the dinner
table — horseflesh I remember more than once,
crocodile another day, mice baked in batter on
a third — while the guinea-pig under the table in-
quiringly nibbled at your infantine toes, the bear
walked round your chair and rasped your hand
with file-like tongue, the jackal's fiendish yell close
by came through the open window, the monkey's
hairy arm extended itself suddenly over your shoul-
der to annex your fruit and walnuts. I think the
Doctor rather scared us ; we did not understand his
sharp, quick voice and peremptory manner, and pre-
ferred the company of his kind, charming, highly
cultured wife. Others found him alarming ; dis-
honesty and quackery of all kinds fled from that
keen, all-knowing vision. When Tom Tower was
being repaired, he watched the workmen from his
window with a telescope, and frightened a scamp-
ing mason whom he encountered descending from
the scaffold by bidding him go back and bring
down that faulty piece of work he had just put
into a turret. At Palermo, on his wedding tour,
he visited St. Rosalia's shrine,

The grot where olives nod,
Where, darling of each heart and eye,
From all the youth of Sicily

St. Rosalie retired to God.

It was opened by the priests, and the relics of the

DR. BUCKLAND

The Ansdell Portrait. From Mrs. Gordons "Life of Buckland" reproduced by
permission of the authoress and of the publisher, Mr. John Murray

PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 41

saint were shown. He saw that they were not
Rosalia's : "They are the bones of a goat/' he
cried out, "not of a woman;'' and the sanctuary
doors were abruptly closed.

Frank used to tell of their visit long afterwards to
a foreign cathedral, where was exhibited a martyr's
blood — dark spots on the pavement ever fresh and
ineradicable. The professor dropped on the pave-
ment and touched the stain with his tongue. " I
can tell you what it is ; it is bat's urine ! "

I can see him now, passing rapidly through the
quadrangle and down St. Aldate's— broad-brimmed
hat, tail coat, umbrella, great blue bag. This last
he always carried ; it is shown in AnsdelPs portrait,
the best likeness of him by far. Sir H. Davy once
expected him, and, disappointed, asked his servant
if Dr. Buckland had not called. " No, sir, there has
been no one but a man with a bag ; he called three
times, and I always told him you were out." His
umbrella he was for ever losing ; not through in-
advertence, he declared, but through larceny : he set
up a red umbrella : that too was pirated : engraved
finally on the handle " Stolen from Dr. Buckland,"
that met the case ; he became for the first time per-
manently umbrelliferous.

Suddenly, in the midst of unsurpassed energy
and usefulness, came the blow which ended, not the
life — better perhaps had it been so — but the vigour
and beauty of the life. For eight years he lay tor-
pid and apathetic ; the only books he would open
were the Bible and the Leisure Hour ! His fine
collection, with his own hammermarks and his
wife's neat labels on every stone, he bequeathed to

42 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

his successors in the Chair. It lies, or lay till lately,
neglected, useless, unarranged, in the cellars of the
Museum ; yet, if not for the sake of education and
learning, then for the sake of sentiment and rever-
ence, one would think that the Conscript Fathers
might accord, if they have not yet done so, a place
conspicuous and honoured to the traditions and the
autographs of the first great Oxford scientist.

A life-long friend and fellow pioneer of Daubeny
and Buckland was Baden-Powell, who became
Savilian Professor of Geometry in 1827. His earlier
papers on Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics, had
made him widely notable ; and he distinguished
himself from a very early time by discerning and
urging the need of University reform. Of a nature
eagerly participative, he did much by his popular
addresses to create an appetite for science among
the Oxford citizens, lecturing also to Polytechnics
and Mechanics Institutes throughout the country.
Alone amongst the Oxford teachers of his day he
worked out with ability and boldness, with a single-
minded aspiration after Truth, yet in a calm and
temperate spirit, those attractive problems of the
relation between Science and Religion, which his
contemporaries for the most part handled only in
support of personal and party preconceptions, or
shirked through fear of the odium which they were
certain to excite. As a member of the first Uni-
versity Commission, he did much to enforce the
claims of Science to a prominent position in the Uni-
^versity curriculum. He died, all too soon, in 1860.
7 I think the only Lectures besides Buckland's which

V drew students to a class-room were those on (t ex-

/ \j

PRESCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 43

perimental Philosophy/' as it was called ; delivered
in the Clarendon by a cheery Mr. Walker, who
constructed and exploded gases, laid bare the
viscera of pumps and steam engines, forced mercury
through wood blocks in a vacuum, manipulated
galvanic batteries, magic-lanterns, air-guns. This
last demonstration once, like decent David's dancing
in "Don Juan," "excited some remark." A wicked
wag loaded the air-gun before the professor entered,
and when the trigger was pulled we saw some
plaster fall from the ceiling, and a clatter was heard
presently on the staircase. The bullet had gone up
into the lecture-room above, and put to flight
another professor with his pupils. Walker was a
man of great ability ; the first, I believe, to intro-
duce into Oxford the analytical as distinct from the
geometrical treatment of higher mathematics. He
was also a notable preacher of the evangelical school ;
his sermons pure in style, and reflecting strong
personal piety.

A humbler philosopher in the same line was
Thomas, a Holywell glazier, who used to give gra-
tuitous popular lectures in the music-room to work-
ing men, using implements and apparatus, magnets,
galvanometers, induction coils, cleverly fashioned
by himself. He was genuinely and widely scientific ;
made an interesting discovery as to the thinness
at which decomposed glass yields complemen-
tary colours — I have some of his specimens in
my cabinet — discovered that certain double salts,
crystallised at particular temperatures, assume
special forms and become beautiful microscopic
objects — an electrician, a naturalist, an optician, a

44 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

discoverer, a working man. A few years later came
another self-taught genius, Chapman, a watchmaker
with a shop opposite Balliol, whose large and well-
stocked marine aquarium, a thing of beauty at that
time rare, attracted wondering visitors. He it was
who discovered and rescued the monster Cetiosaurus
at Kirtlington Station. He had dismounted from
the train with his son on a botanising expedition
just as the first fragment was disclosed by the pick-
axe ; found the foreman, stopped the digging, tele-
graphed for Phillips, who superintended the removal
of the enormous bones to the Oxford Museum.
The credit accrued to Phillips, no one mentioned
Chapman. " The page slew the boar, the peer had
the gloire."

But the names of Phillips and the Museum are
anticipatory : I must go back to clear the way for
them. The man who made them and much else
possible in Oxford has been dead only a few years,
member of a family exceptional in longevity as
in almost all besides. His advent in the early
Forties, his regeneration of the Anatomy School at
Christchurch, the Hope Bequest, the erection of the
new Museum, the remarkable genius who was its
architect, the impulse which it communicated at
once to Science and Art, its welcome to the British
Association, its handselling by the Great Darwin
fight in its new Theatre from morn till dewy eve,
when Huxley and S. Wilberforce were protagonists,
and Henslow held the stakes, — I must keep for
another chapter.

CHAPTER IV

SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE

"Jam jam Efficaci do manus Sciential

— HORACE.

Dr. Acland — His Influence — The New Museum — Its Erection — Pollen
—Woodward — An Art Colony — William Morris and Rossetti —
The British Association Meeting of 1860 — The Darwinian Dis-
cussion— Wilberforce and the " Venerable Ape " — Huxley's Reply
— The Statistician and the Symbolist — After the Battle — Dar-
winism a Decade Later — The Microscopical Society — J. O.
West wood.

IN 1844 Dr. Acland, settling in Oxford as a
physician on Dr. Wootten's early and lamented
death, was made Lee's Reader of Anatomy at
Christchurch. The subject had not formed part
of University studies ; Sir Christopher Pegge had
drawn small audiences to fluent desultory lectures ;
Dr. Kidd, who vacated the chair to Dr. Acland, had
published an able monograph on the anatomy of
the mole-cricket, whose novelty moved the mirth
of his professional brethren. The small theatre
contained a cast of Eclipse's skeleton with a few
dreary preparations in wax ; corpses were sent
from the gallows for dissections, at which an
intending medical student would now and then
assist ; there was a tradition that the body of a
woman hanged for murder had once, when laid
out on the table, shown signs of life, had been
restored by the professor, and dismissed, let us

45

46 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

hope to sin no more. In Oxford, or out of it,
Invertebrate Zoology was a subject little studied,
and Comparative Anatomy was unknown. Besides
the regular students' course at St. George's Hospital,
Acland had spent two valuable years in Edinburgh.
Here he learned to handle the then unfamiliar
microscope, and acquired under the famous Good-
sir that insight into Comparative Anatomy and
that conception of museum arrangement which
were ere long to differentiate him from his medical
brethren. The Readership of Anatomy fell vacant,
and was offered to him by the Dean. With Good-
sir's help he amassed preparations and slides ; along
with Edward Forbes visited the Shetlands for
dredging and dissection ; returned to Oxford with
fourteen large packing cases, and set himself to
create a little Hunterian museum on the banks
of Isis. He employed for dissection the deft
fingers of ]. G. Wood, then an undergraduate :
from the yet more skilful hands of Charles
Robertson — who, under his tuition, became after-
wards Aldrichian Demonstrator and tutor for the
Science Schools, and whose " Zoological Series"
gained a medal in the Exhibition of 1862 —
proceeded nearly all the beautiful biological
preparations now on the Museum shelves. The
lectures began in 1845 ; they were delivered in
the downstairs theatre, whence we ascended to
the room above, to sit at tables furnished with
little railroads on which ran microscopes charged
with illustrations of the lecture, alternately with
trays of coffee. A few senior men came from time
to time, but could not force their minds into the

SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 47

new groove. Dr. Ogle, applying his eye to the
microscope, screwed a quarter-inch right through
the object; and Dr. Kidd, after examining some
delicate morphological preparation, while his young
colleague explained its meaning, made answer first,
that he did not believe in it, and, secondly, that if
it were true he did not think God meant us to
know it. So we were mostly undergraduates ;
and greatly we enjoyed lectures, microscopes,
and the discussions which Dr. Acland encouraged ;
though these last exercises were after a time sup-
pressed, as endangering lapses into the leve et
ludicrum. On one occasion, so fame reported,
the men being invited to relate instances of sur-
prising animal instinct, it was announced by an
imaginative student, to the consteration of the
professor, who did not appreciate jokes, that "he
knew a man whose sister had a tame jellyfish
which would sit up and beg."

We discerned his weaknesses, liked him, I think,
all the better for them, as bringing him nearer to
ourselves. His stiff sense of rectitude, oppressive
sometimes both to his neighbours and himself,
obstructed the easy relation, begotten usually by
public school and College friction, which some
teachers establish with their pupils. For neither
at Harrow nor at Oxford was he on clubbable
terms with his fellows. Lacking in a sense of
humour, he often mistook fun for levity : de-
nounced, I remember, as "unprofitable," Sydney
Smith's hearteasing merriment ; and his sensitive-
ness occasionally misinterpreted an impersonal
frolic as an intentional offence against himself.

48 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

As he was by nature strongly emotional, the
hysterica passio would " swell up/' as poor Lear
says, with disconcerting suddenness. Henry Fur-
neaux, prince of raconteurs and mimics, used to
relate how he once burst into tears at first
sight of a pretty little window constructed by
Woodward in his absence : he was ill in bed for
a week after witnessing Tom Taylor's " Joan of
Arc " : and his broken-hearted self-tormentings over
his own supposed religious deficiencies brought
on him a manly rebuke from Liddell. His habit
of assuming in argument a tone of moral supe-
riority was wont to exasperate opponents. He
would press his views upon his colleagues in
conference with a sort of tremulous affectionate-
ness — the aterna mansuetudo of the Thunny Squib
(page XI5) — breaking their heads, as Rolleston
said, with precious balms ; then, if disappointed,
he would be peevish, lose temper, court defeat.
Max Miiller, asked how he had contrived to
force through Convocation an extremely debat-
able measure, answered, "We got Acland to speak
against it."

These were spots in the sun, to be recalled
with lenient and good-humoured allowance, but
essential to a complete understanding of the man.

Meanwhile his teaching bore fruit; and before
the Forties had run half their course the question
of a Museum arose. There were Buckland's
treasures houseless, Dr. Acland's had outgrown
their sedem angustam, and when Hope's noble
entomological collection, accepted together with
its curator, had to be stored away in drawers and

SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 49

boxes of a room in the Taylor building, it was
felt that the old Ashmolean must be supplanted
by a temple worthy of the University. The pro-
posal was vehemently denounced ; by economists
on the ground of cost, by the old-fashioned
classicists as intrusive, by theologians as subtly
ministering to false doctrine, heresy, and schism.
Sewell of Exeter strained the clerical prerogative
of bigotry by protesting against it in a University
sermon. Backed by Daubeny, Powell, Buckland,
as later by Dean Liddell and Professor Phillips,
Dr. Acland sedulously pressed it ; till early in the
Fifties the money was voted, the design adopted,
the first stone laid by Lord Derby, and the work
begun — due, as ought always to be remembered,
to the initiative and persistence of Acland more
than of any other man. Its erection popularised
in Oxford Art no less than Science. The growth
of artistic feeling had been for some time per-
ceptible ; the Eldon drawings were laid out in
the Taylor ; Mr. Combe's fine gallery of Pre-
Raphaelites, the collections of choice engravings
made by Griffiths of Wadham and by Manuel
Johnson, were liberally and kindly shown ; James
Wyatt, the picture dealer, loved to fill his High
Street shop with Prouts and Constables and
Havills, and an occasional Turner water-colour ;
an exhibition of paintings at the Angel, promoted
by Captain Strong, an accomplished amateur,
brought out unknown talent and drew the artists
together. Millais was often in Oxford as the guest
of Mr. Drury at Shotover ; Holman Hunt was
working in Mr. Combe's house at "The Light of

50 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

the World," brought with him from Chelsea ; nor
can any one who knew young Venables, curate of
St. Paul's, an intimate with the Combes, doubt
whence, consciously or unconsciously, Hunt drew
the face of his Christ.

Another pioneer of Art was John Hungerford
Pollen, Fellow of Merton. Calling on friends
and finding the oak sported, he would leave his
card in the form of pencil drawings on the stair-
case-wall without. Once at New College, when
these walls were being newly coloured, we made
intercession with the Bursar to leave untouched
the sacer paries adjoining William Heathcote's
rooms, which were inwrought with vigorous de-
lineations of "Civitas Bethlehem, TTO?U? Nazareth,
Urbs Jerusalem," from Pollen's pencil. He was
a far - and - wide traveller, and with congenial
friends would pour forth his experiences and
show his sketches. Heathcote used to tell how
one evening at the Skenes, when Miss Skene, a
fine Handelian singer, was emulating the coyness
of Sardus Tigellius, Pollen offered, if she would
sing " Waft her Angels," to execute the Muezzin's
call to prayer. This he did in perfection, sitting
cross-legged on the floor with rocking body and
resonant ascending drawling cry. He left his
monument in the painted ceiling of Merton
Chapel. I used to go in and watch him at
work, recumbent all day long upon a scaffolding,
his brush busy, and his black hair showing against
the white blouse he wore. The cherubs filling the
medallion were drawn from Magdalen Choristers :
one was my brother, afterwards Rector of Stand-

WOODWARD, ARCHITECT OF THE MUSEUM
From a Photograph

SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 51

lake, another was Charles Corfe, son to the Christ-
church organist ; the Madonna was his mother,
Mrs. Corfe ; one of the angels was a Miss Smythe.
Eight years after, when long cut off from College
life, he came with Rossetti to decorate Wood-
ward's Union Debating Room, his contribution
being Arthur's investment with the brand Ex-
calibur. We were all prepared for his secession
in his Proctor's year, nor surprised to read in
The Times one day that he had joined the Church
of Rome. Two days later came a characteristic
note from him to the premature journal: "As
the statement is untrue, you will have the good-
ness to contradict it." Delane apologised, and
gave up his informer, Oakley, who sent in his
turn a furious remonstrance, which The Times
snubbed. The report was untimely, that was all ;
he left us shortly afterwards.

Then into our midst came Woodward, architect
of the Museum, a man of rare genius and deep
artistic knowledge, beautiful in face and character,
but with the shadow of an early death already
stealing over him. He was a grave and curiously
silent man : of his partners, men greatly his in-
feriors, the elder, Sir Thomas Deane, was a cease-
less chatterbox, the younger, son to Sir Thomas,
stammered. Speaking in Congregation, Jeune hit
off the trio after his manner : " One won't talk, one
can't talk, one never stops talking." Woodward
brought with him his Dublin pupils, drew round
him eager Oxonians, amongst them Morris and
Burne-Jones, not long come up to Exeter. The
lovely Museum rose before us like an exhalation ;

52 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

its every detail, down to panels and footboards,
gas-burners and door handles, an object lesson in
art, stamped with Woodward's picturesque inven-
tiveness and refinement. Not before had ironwork
been so plastically trained as by Skidmore in the
chestnut boughs and foliage which sustained the
transparent roof : the shafts of the interior arcades,
representing in their sequence the succession of
British rocks, sent us into the Radcliffe Library
for the mastery of geological classification; every
morning came the handsome red-bearded Irish
brothers Shea, bearing plants from the Botanic
Garden, to reappear under their chisels in the
rough-hewn capitals of the pillars.

" Nor herb nor flow'ret glistened there
But was carved in the cloister arches as fair."

It seemed that Art was in the air : Mrs. Bar-
tholomew Price, with Miss Cardwell's aid, painted
her St. Giles' drawing-room in no Philistine taste ;
the graceful sunshade work outside Dr. Acland's
windows found imitation in many another street ;
Ruskin, whose books in 1850 Sewell, the librarian
of my College, refused to purchase for the library,
was read as he had not been read before ; while he
himself hovered about to bless the Museum work,
to offer cheques, and to suggest improvements
which silent Woodward sometimes smiling put by.
The Committee of the Union authorised Wood-
ward to build a debating-room, to decorate which
— alas ! upon untempered mortar ! — came down
Rossetti and Val Prinsep, and Hughes and Stan-
hope, and Pollen, and Monro the sculptor. A

SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 53

merry, rollicking set they were : I was working
daily in the Library, which at that time opened into
the gallery of the new room, and heard their laugh-
ter and songs and jokes and the volleys of their
soda-water corks ; for this innutrient fluid was
furnished to them without stint at the Society's
expense, and the bill from the Star Hotel close by
amazed the treasurer. It was during this visit that
Morris and Rossetti, with Rogers, a pupil of Wood-
ward, hunting in the parish churches on Sunday
evenings to find a Guinevere, met with the handsome
girl who became afterwards the wife of William
Morris and Rossetti's cherished friend. I well re-
member her sister and herself; she survives in
sacred widowhood.

At last the Museum was so far finished as to
receive the British Association of 1860. Sections
fell conveniently into the lecture-rooms : the area,
not yet filled with cases, held the evening gather-
ings ; and the large Library, devoid of books
and shelves, was dedicated to the Darwinian dis-
cussion, the great event of the week. The room
filled early, and we waited long. Owen was to
take the chair, but did not come ; he was replaced
by an unclerical-looking man in black, whom we
in Oxford knew not, but whom all Cambridge
honoured as Professor Henslow. The attack on
Darwin's book was to be led by the Bishop of
Oxford, who had written in the last Quarterly a
denunciatory article inspired by Owen, and Huxley
was to head the defence. The Bishop came late,
trampling his way through the dense crowd to his
place upon the platform, his face no longer re-

54 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

fined and spiritual as in the early Richmond por-
trait ; coarsened somewhat, even plebeianised, by
advancing years, but resourceful, pugnacious, im-
pregnable, not a little arrogant. On the chairman's
other side sat Huxley ; hair jet black and thick,
slight whiskers, pale full fleshy face, the two strong
lines of later years already marked, an ominous
quiver in his mouth, and an arrow ready to come
out of it. For a moment Daubeny beamed on us
at the upper door, inviting all at three o'clock to
his experimental garden on the Iffley Road. Pro-
fessor Draper of New York, eminent, serious, nasal,
read a paper on Evolution ; then, during an ex-
pectant pause, out came the Derby dog in the
person of old " Dicky " Greswell of Worcester, who,
with great eyes, vast white neckcloth, luminous
bald head and spectacles, rising and falling rhyth-
mically on his toes, opined that all theories as to
the ascent of man were vitiated by the fact, un-
doubted but irrelevant, that, in the words of Pope,
Great Homer died three thousand years ago.
Another pause, an appeal from the chairman to
Huxley, his sarcastic response that he certainly held
a brief for Science, but had not yet heard it assailed.
Then up got Wilberforce, argumentative, rheto-
rical, amusing ; retraced the ground of his article,
distinguished between a " working and a causal
hypothesis," complimented " Professor Huxley
who is about to demolish me," plagiarised from a
mountebank sermon by Burgon, expressing the
" disquietude " he should feel were a " venerable
ape " to be shown to him as his ancestress in the
Zoo : a piece of clever, diverting, unworthy clap-

PROFESSOR HUXLEY

From a Photograph taken at the Meeting of the British Association, 1860

SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE $J

trap. Huxley rose, white with anger. " I should
be sorry to demolish so eminent a prelate, but for
myself I would rather be descended from an ape
than from a divine who employs authority to stifle
truth." A gasp and shudder through the room, the
scientists uneasy, the orthodox furious, the Bishop
wearing that fat, provoking smile which once, as
Osborne Gordon reminds us,1 impelled Lord Derby
in the House of Lords to an unparliamentary
quotation from " Hamlet." " I am asked," Huxley
went on, "if I accept Mr. Darwin's book as a
complete causal hypothesis. Belated on a roadless
common in a dark night, if a lantern were offered
to me, should I refuse it because it shed imperfect
light ? I think not— I think not." He met Wilber-
force's points, not always effectively, not entirely at
his ease; the "venerable ape's" rude arms were
choking him. The Bishop radiantly purged him-
self. He did not mean to hurt the Professor's
feelings ; it was our fault — we had laughed, and
that made him pursue the joke. We laughed again,
and Huxley was not appeased.

Another pause, broken by a voice from the crowd
of a grey-haired, Roman-nosed, elderly gentleman.
It was Admiral Fitzroy, and men listened ; but
when they found he had nothing more to say than
that Darwin's book had given him acutest pain, the
irreverent cry of "Question " silenced him. Another
voice from the far end of the long room : a stout
man waved and slapped a blue-book ; told us that
he was no naturalist but a statistician, and that if
you could prove Darwin's theories you could prove
1 Page 154, note.

56 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

anything. A roar of displeasure proclaimed the
meeting's inaptitude at that moment for statistics,
and the stout man made his exit with a defiant
remonstrance. Now, we thought, for business ;
but no, there was another act of comedy. From
the back of the platform emerged a clerical gentle-
man, asking for a blackboard. It was produced,
and amid dead silence he chalked two crosses at its
opposite corners, and stood pointing to them as if
admiring his achievement. We gazed at him, and
he at us, but nothing came of it, till suddenly the
absurdity of the situation seemed to strike the
whole assembly simultaneously, and there went
up such an aa-fiea-ros <ye\a>s as those serious walls
would, henceforth, never hear. Again and again the
laughter pealed, as purposeless laughter is wont to
do ; under it the artist and his blackboard were gently
persuaded to the rear, and we saw him no more.
He was discovered to be a Cornish parson, scientifi-
cally minded ; but what his hieratics meant or what
he wished to say remains inscrutable, the thought
he had in him, as Carlyle says of the long-flowing
Turk who represented the human species at the heels
of Anacharsis Clootz, conjectural to this day.

So at last the fight began, with words strong
on either side, and arguments long since super-
annuate ; so all day long the noise of battle rolled.
The younger men were on the side of Darwin, the
older men against him ; Hooker led the devotees,
Sir Benjamin Brodie the malcontents ; till the
sacred dinner-hour drew near. Henslow dismissed
us with an impartial benediction, College Halls
and hospitable homes received both combatants

SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 57

and audience ; nor had Daubeny any visitors to
his experimental garden. Next day I met Rolleston,
and asked after Huxley's symptoms. " In my
room," said he, "hang portraits of Huxley, and
of S. Oxon. When I came down this morning
I give you my word that Huxley's photograph
had turned yellow." Ten years later I encountered
him, anything but yellow, at the Exeter meeting
of the Association. Again there was a bitter assault
on Darwinism, this time by a Scottish doctor of
divinity ; with smiling serenity Huxley smote him
hip and thigh, the audience, hostile or cold at
Oxford, here ecstatically acquiescent. The decade
had worked its changes : Darwin and Evolution,
fighting in their courses against Inscience and
Prejudice, had subdued the popular mind. Philistia
herself was glad of them.

In Oxford for a time after this science was
tolerated sceptically rather than cordially welcomed.
"Brodie has done it at last, gentlemen," laughed
Chaffers cheerfully to his Brasenose pupils, when
during lecture was heard a tremendous explosion
—issuing, as it turned out, from the new heating
apparatus at St. Mary's, not from the Glastonbury
laboratory. At this day, according to Professor
Ray Lankester, it receives an indecently inadequate
proportion either of recognition or emolument.
Conservatism hated it as novel, Orthodoxy feared
it as emancipating ; even men like Jowett l pro-
claimed war against it on behalf of the "ancient
studies," as encroaching on and menacing the
" higher conception of knowledge and of the mind,"
1 " Life and Letters of Jowett," vol. ii. p. 268.

58 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

as antagonistic to " morals and religion and philo-
sophy and history and language" — curiously un-
aware that their own avowed ignorance of its
nature, subjects, tendencies, precluded them from
forming, much more from expressing, an opinion.
Nevertheless, before the decade was far advanced
science established itself in Oxford. The Museum
buildings formed an object lesson which it was
impossible to overlook; their contents, laid out
and labelled, their minerals, fossils, insects, zoo-
logical specimens and preparations, appealed to
the naturalist instinct which from many natures
school and college had not quite extirpated ; pro-
fessors came amongst us, men already stamped
with classical University distinction, Rolleston,
Brodie, Balfour ; or, like Mrs. Bayham Badger's
second husband, " men of European reputation,"
such as dear old Phillips. The splendid show of
microscopes at the British Association conversa-
zione had excited interest and emulation ; and
when in 1861 an enthusiastic young New College
naturalist projected a Microscopical Society the
idea was warmly taken up. Dr. Acland was its
first president, and delivered an inaugural address ;
it met and worked regularly, with papers and
discussions, systematic investigation of the rich
Oxford microscopic fauna, periodical exhibitions
in the Museum, which drew large audiences and
laid wide foundations.

Conspicuous at these gatherings was the famous
entomologist and very lovable personage, ]. O.
Westwood, who had come to Oxford in the late
Forties as controller of Mr. Hope's collection. As

SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 59

far as I know, he has never been memorialised in
print, and I may appropriately end this science
chapter with a brief tribute to his memory. His
claim to eminence was not only biological ; he was
also a specialist in the archaeology and palaeography
of art, the highest living authority on fictile ivories
and inscribed stones. Born and brought up a
Quaker, he was apprenticed to an engraver, acquir-
ing the power of accurate delineation which enabled
him so graphically to illustrate his various works.
Articled for a time to a London solicitor and after-
wards a partner in the firm, he was persuaded by
Mr. Hope to remove to Oxford, first as curator of
the Hope collection, then as earliest occupant of the
Natural History Chair which Hope was founding ;
and at Oxford Westwood remained till his death.
Sprung from the ranks, and a late-born son of the
University, he received scant welcome from the
Dons ; the exclusiveness of that time being further
aggravated by his Nonconformist origin and
opinions, until rebuked by Richard Michell, the
Public Orator, who reminded his friends that their
new colleague was "not sectarian but insectarian."
The good-humoured simplicity of his manner and
his unfailing amiability to all who sought enlighten-
ment in his department soon won men's hearts, and
he became as popular as he deserved to be.

I knew him not till 1860. Attracted by a jar
containing live specimens of the uncommon and
beautiful Cheirocephalus diaphanus, which I had
found in a rain-water pool near the Headington
Asylum, and had sent to a natural history exhibition
at the Town Hall, he begged me to call on him at

60 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

the Museum ; and finding that I was studying the
Coleoptera, placed at my disposal books and speci-
mens; sparing no pains to encourage and assist me.
I happened to be dexterous in microscopical pre-
paration, and he urged the Museum Delegates to
employ me in mounting a series of insect anatomies
after a conception of his own; but the plan fell
through. His own technique was as remarkable
as his knowledge ; with no tools except scissors,
forceps, lens, camel-hair brush, gum tragacanth,
and colour box, he performed miracles of dissection
and restoration. I remember his falling from a
ladder in the Library, and crushing in his breast-
pocket a pill-box containing a rare beetle. The
ruin seemed hopeless, the insect a powder of frag-
ments; but he set to work at once, and next day
showed me the beetle restored to all its former
beauty. His unerring instinct in diagnosing and
locating a new species was made the subject of a
practical joke. Some saucy young entomologists
obtained a chocolate beetle, made and coloured
under their directions, from a famous shop in Paris,
and sent it to Westwood for identification fixed in a
glass-topped box. He wrote that without handling
it he could not be certain of the genus, but that it
was a tetramerous beetle belonging to the family
Cerambycidce. The useful letter "h " he never suc-
ceeded in pronouncing. He once asked Mansel
who was St. Bee. Remembering his peculiarity,
Mansel answered that he was a near kinsman of
St. 'Ives. At an electoral contest between Mr.
Gladstone and Mr. Hardy, Westwood, coming in
late, hurried and breathless, announced his vote for

SCIENTIFIC SCIENCE 61

" Glad , no, no, I mean 'Ardy." Henry Smith

claimed the vote for Gladstone. "Why," said the
Vice-Chancellor, "he only pronounced the first
syllable of Mr. Gladstone's name." "Yes, sir;
but he did not pronounce the first letter of Mr.
Hardy's."

He left more than one standard work : in science,
the "Modern Classification of Insects," and a beau-
tiful but costly monograph of "British Moths
and Butterflies " ; in art, the " Palaeographia Sacra
Pictoria," with " Miniatures and Ornaments of
Anglo-Saxon and Irish MSS.," and the monumental
" Lapidarium Walliae." He was President of the
Entomological Society, and received the Royal
Society's gold medal. We felt when he passed away
that a zoological professor as good, perhaps better,
might be found ; but that the minutely accom-
plished entomologist, holding in mind's eye and
memory all the discovered and named insects in all
the museums of the world, accessible from his fluent
colloquial French and German to every Continental
scientist, ready ever to display and expound his
treasures, patiently to the unlearned, enthusi-
astically to the accomplished visitor, could probably
never be replaced. Men said of him, as was said of
Richelieu when he died, " II laisse plus de vide qu'il
n'a tenu de place." Entering the familiar room, I
shall never cease to miss and to recall regretfully
the short figure, shrewd kindly eye, welcoming
voice, long wave of snow white hair and beard,
which went to form the outward man of J. O.
Westwood.

CHAPTER V

AESCULAPIUS IN THE THIRTIES

" This is the Prince of Leeches : fever, plague,
Cold rheum, and hot podagra, do but look on him,
And quit their grasp upon the tortured sinews"

— WALTER SCOTT.

An Oxford Medical Directory — Pegge — Wall— Bourn — Kidd — Ireland
— West — Wood — Tuckwell — A Picturesque Survival— A Friend
of Abernethy — His Wonderful Memory — His jeux d'esprit —
The Last of the Old School.

" LONG and lasting," says Lockhart in his now for-
gotten " Reginald Dalton," while he recounts the
blood-letting of an Oxford town 'and gown row —
" long and lasting shall be the tokens of its wrath —
long shall be the faces of Pegge, Wall, Kidd, and
light shall be their hearts, as they walk their rounds
to-morrow morning — long shall be the stately stride
of Ireland, and long the clyster-pipe of West — long
and deep shall be the probing of thy skilful lancet,
O Tuckwell ; and long shall be all your bills, and
long, very long, shall it be ere some of them are
paid." Lockhart wrote in the Twenties, but most of
his doctors were walking their rounds ten years
later ; walking, for Oxford was a small place then,
and our medicos performed their ambarvalia on
foot. Sir Christopher Pegge was a showy, hand-
some man, a Fellow of Oriel in Oriel's prime of

reputation ; he had no great practice, but as

62

^ISCULAPIUS IN THE THIRTIES 63

Regius Professor drew men to his spirited lectures.
Though comparatively young, he wore the old-
fashioned cocked hat and wig, with the massive
gold-headed cane, which his successor, Dr. Kidd —
a sensible, homely creature — was the first medical
professor to abandon. Kidd, Wall, Bourn were the
popular physicians of the decade. Kidd was a little
man, trotting about the streets in a " spencer," a
tailless greatcoat then becoming obsolete, and worn
only by himself and Dr. Macbride. Bourn was an
insinuating, smiling, soft-voiced man — "Have we
any report from the bowels?" was his regular
whispered question to lady patients suffering from
what Epimenides the Cretan called ryao-re/w apyai.
Wall I cannot recall, but I remember his widow
and Bourn's, picturesque old ladies in black velvet
and lace, whose card-parties, preceded by formal
tea and closed by substantial suppers, attracted the
clever genial men and women whom I have earlier
mentioned. Dr. Ogle, father to a distinguished
Fellow of Lincoln, who died all too early, lived on
into the early Fifties ; as did Kidd, with two droll
little daughters something like himself. Eden, when
Vicar of St. Mary's, once invited the pair to tea ;
stuffed them with cake and muffin; — for a tea
was a square meal in those days — dismissed them
with the farewell, which they received in the
belief that it was a religious pastoral benediction :

Ite domum, Satura, venit Hesperus, ite, Capellce.

Ireland represented the " matriculated apothe-
caries" of that date, men who, like the elder Pen-
dennis in his lowly days, made up their own

64 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

medicines, attended ladies at the most interesting
period of their lives, sold Epsom salts, blisters, hair
powder, across the counter of the shops which they
called their surgeries. Some remained humble to
the end; not so Ireland, who somehow obtained a
Scotch degree, discarded the surgery, and set up a
brass plate as Dr. Ireland on his house in Penny-
farthing Street. He was a grandiloquent, pompous
man; Lockhart's " stately stride" exactly hits him
off. I remember his swing along the street with
cane held at attention ; recall his stalking into my
mother's drawing-room with his new honour fresh
upon him, and bespeaking her congratulations on
the fact that he would "enter the Kingdom of
Heaven as a Doctor of Medicine." I saw him later
in extreme old age ; he said that he was ninety-nine
years old — he was nothing like so old — but he
added, with his hands aloft, "My memory is in
ruins." He deserved credit, however, for discover-
ing the mathematical talent of his servant lad Abram
Robertson, who became afterwards Professor of
Astronomy. West was his partner — tall, gentle-
manlike, gold-spectacled, married to the daughter
of a rich and notable Alderman Fletcher, whose
hands continued to hold her cards long after they
had ceased, through rheumatism, to be for other
purposes prehensile. West's partner again and
subsequent successor was Wood, father to the natu-
ralist, who lived in the fine corner house opposite
the King's Arms, built by Vanbrugh, and destroyed
to make way for the Indian Institute.

But by far the most conspicuous and interesting
of Lockhart's Hakims was Tuckwell, for thirty years

MR. TUCKWELL, SURGEON
From a Water-Colour Drawing by J. F. Wood, 1833

AESCULAPIUS IN THE THIRTIES 65

— from 1815 to 1845 — the leading Oxford surgeon.
In costume and demeanour he was a survival from
the more picturesque and ceremonious past. He
pervaded Oxford in a claret-coloured tail coat with
velvet collar, canary waistcoat with gilt buttons,
light brown trousers, two immense white cravats
propping and partly covering the chin, a massive
well-brushed beaver hat.1 His manner and address
were extraordinarily winning ; a contemporary de-
scribed him to me long ago, in a letter which I
happened to preserve, as " the most fascinating
man I ever met, a favourite with all who knew
him ; his cheery brightness invaluable in a sick
room, supported as it was by his high repute and
skill." Mr. Abernethy, discontinuing practice, en-
treated him to take his place ; he was, said Sir
Benjamin Brodie to me in 1853, "one of the
cleverest surgeons of his day." He was not a
member of the University, but had been educated
at the then famous Aynho Grammar School, whose
eccentric master, Mr. Leonard, was known for his
scholarship and for his addiction to green tea,
which he kept ever by his side to moisten his
construes in Tacitus and Horace. So Tuckwell
knew his Latin books minutely, and could quote
them effectively. He was pupil to Abernethy, who
became much attached to him; his dinner table
after his marriage held a magnificent epergne,
a wedding present from the famous surgeon.
Amongst his comrades were the lads known

1 Beaver. — There were no silk hats until late in the Thirties.
The beaver cost two guineas ; only gentlemen wore them. New
College men of that day were known by their unbrushed hats.

E

66 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

afterwards as Dr. Skey and Sir George Burrows.
He worked hard at his profession, and made him-
self a proficient besides in French, Spanish, and
Italian. He went to Oxford, without introduction,
friends, or money, about 1808, but rose rapidly
into practice, establishing himself in the house
opposite Magdalen elms, which a very few old
Oxford men still associate with his name, and
which was to bear in later years the door-plate
of his son. His name is not only embalmed
in Lockhart's novel, but points the moral of a
bitter passage in the " Oxford Spy " : —

" If tutors punish what they seldom shun,
Severe to all who do — as they have done —
Their wild career at once pursue, condemn ;
Give fees to Tuckwell, and advice to them."

It was, as we have seen, the day of early dinners,
late suppers, nightly cards. Ombre had gone out ;
though it was said that old Miss Horseman could
still illustrate Belinda's game, and unfold the mys-
teries of Manille and Matador. Quadrille, piquet,
whist, were the games in vogue ; and at the last
two Tuckwell was said to be one of the best
players in England. David Gregorie, the Queen's
Square magistrate, invited him to a three nights'
contest at piquet. It took place at Oxford, in
a select gathering of experts, and Gregorie re-
turned to London three hundred pounds the
poorer. He was no less skilful as a chess player,
having learned from the famous Sarratt, the great
chess teacher, whose fee was a guinea a lesson ;
and founding the club already mentioned in these

AESCULAPIUS IN THE THIRTIES 67

papers. The marvellous memory which explains
his prowess at cards was shown in his power of
quoting poetry. Few men could beat him in
capping verses; those present with him at a
large party were challenged to write down the
titles of Shakespeare's plays; all tried, but he
alone succeeded. The story I am about to relate
seems incredible, but I heard it long ago from not
a few independent witnesses. A bet was laid, and
heavy odds taken against it, that he would repeat
ten consecutive lines from any one place at which
he might be set on in Shakespeare, Milton, Dante,
or Lope de Vega. The bet was won. What pro-
verbs and riddles were to Solomon and his cour-
tiers, that were impromptus and epigrams to the
lively convives of that pleasant time. A lady sang
one night a pretty Italian song by Metastasio, and
the company appealed to him for a translation.
He hastily pencilled it as follows : —

" Gentle Zephyr, ah ! if e'er

Thou meetst the Mistress of my heart,
Tell her thou'rt a sigh sincere,

But never say whose sigh thou art.
Limpid Rivulet, ah ! if e'er

Thy murmuring waters near her glide,
Say thou'rt swelled by many a tear,

But not whose eyes those tears supplied."

Catherine Fanshawe's poem on the letter H created
much excitement when it appeared.1 It was dis-
cussed one evening in his presence, and a Miss
Harriett Lee, a very clever girl — afterwards Mrs.

1 Appendix D.

68 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Wingfield, of Tickencote Hall— disparaged it. " It's
no great thing," she said ; " Tuckwell would have
done it just as well." Next morning he carried
to her these lines on the letter W : —

" Its existence began with this World full of tears,
And it first in the Work of Creation appears.
In the Whirlwind we feel and acknowledge its power,
And its influence hail in each soft falling Shower.
Its presence the Woods and the Waters must own,
And 'tis found in the Dwelling of monarch and clown.
It will never forsake us in Want or in Woe,
And is heard in each Word that can comfort bestow.
It dwells with the Wealthy, the Witty, the Wise,
Yet assistance to Wretchedness never denies.
'Twill be found in the Sweets of each opening flower,
And hangs on each Dewdrop at twilight's soft hour.
In the mournful Farewell if you hear it with pain,
In the sweet sound of Welcome 'twill meet you again.
'Tis the prop of our Laws, and the guide of our Will,
Which without it would lead us to nothing but 111.
It begins every Wish, every View it must bound,
And still to our Welfare essential is found.
In the last dying Whisper of man it shall rise,
And assist us with Wings to ascend to the skies ;
'Midst the Wonders of Nature its form we shall view,
Until lost in the Wreck which shall Chaos renew."

His heart was as large as his brain was keen ; if
he fascinated his equals, he no less won the love
and gratitude of his humbler neighbours. During
the thirty years of his celebrity his doors stood
open for the first two hours of every over-busy day
to the poor who chose to come, and who streamed
in from the country round to be tended without
a fee. He devoted to their care gratuitously the
same minute and searching skill, the same unerring

AESCULAPIUS IN THE THIRTIES 69

memory and rapid judgment, the same urbane and
cordial presence, which had made him popular
and fashionable among those who were glad to
pay him highly for these gifts ; and when the large
heart ceased to beat and the keen brain to toil,
while amongst a troop of friendly mourners I fol-
lowed his remains along streets darkened by the
signs of universal sorrow, I saw the crowd of poor
—to be counted, it was said, by hundreds — gathered
in from village and from slum for a final tribute to
the friend who had dispensed among them health
and healing through so many years. He was the
last of the old Oxford school ; the " Brilliant Man "
— to quote from Henry Bulwer — amongst his Uni-
versity compeers, as was Canning among a wider
and more high-placed set. He retained the " grand
manner " of a fading age ; the refined and pointed,
not conventional and effusive, courtesy to women ;
the bounteous fund of ever-ready talk, alternating
not monologist, seasoned not swamped with
allusion, recitation, epigram. They played as
well as worked, those fine old fellows — luserunt
satis atque biberunt — lost and won their guineas
gaily, chirruped their genial wit and anecdote, laid
the ghosts of eating cares in floods of generous
" Comet " port, which enriched and liberated,
never dulled or overfraught, their brains. Some
of us love them for it the more ; let the " sicci "
who start away from wine, the purists who spy
sin in cards, remember that behind this radiant
conviviality the higher virtues walked their round,
moral excellence hand in hand with mental
power ; that often, as in Tuckwell's case, the day

yo REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

which culminated in joyous revelry began in self-
devoted altruism, bidding us as our record closes
turn from the catalogue of professional and social
triumphs to

" That best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love."

CHAPTER VI

CALLIOPE IN THE THIRTIES

" The sound

Of instruments that made melodious chime
Was heard, of Harp and Organ ; and who moved
Their chords and stops was seen ; his volant touch
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant Fugue"

— MILTON.

Early Amateurs — Blanco White — Newman — The Bewildered Butler —
Musicians a Caste apart — A Notable Organist — Jonathan Sawell
the Singer — A Letter from the Eighteenth Century — Jullien — The
Amateur Society — Oxford becomes Musical — " Gregorian" Music
—Jenny Lind's Visit — Sir Frederick Ouseley — Sir John Stainer.

WHEN Music, heavenly maid, was young in the
last century, she had few votaries in academic
Oxford. The traditions of the place were against
her ; to be musical was bad form. There was
once, to be sure, a Dean of Christchurch who
wrote charming glees and catches, and respectable
church music ; but the solecisms of Dean Aldrich
were expiated by his successor, Cyril Jackson, who
pronounced that a boy "with no more ear nor a
stone nor no more voice nor an ass " would make
an excellent chorister ; and by Gaisford, who ap-
pointed as singing men worn-out scouts and bed-
makers. In the Twenties and Thirties there were
probably not half - a - dozen amateurs in Oxford.
Blanco White was a violinist, so was Newman ;
and his noble passage on the Inspiration of Music,

72 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

with its curious slip as to fourteen notes in the
scale, has become a locus classicus y1 but he records
the bewilderment of the Provost's butler, when,
sent to announce his election at Oriel, he found
the new Fellow playing on the fiddle, and inquired
anxiously if he had not mistaken the rooms or
come to the wrong person. Donkin played both the
violin and the piano ; George Rowden of New Col-
lege was one of the best double-bass performers in
England : together with Donkin, Menzies, Driffield,
Clifton, and Judge Bayliss, who in his Qist year
still survives, he helped to form a Brasenose Har-
monic Society, which practised and gave concerts.
Now and then at the evening parties of the Heads
a gifted lady would, with Handel, Haydn, or
Mozart, compel, like Milton's nightingale, pleased
silence ; but from these gatherings music, as en-
croaching upon cards, was for the most part ostra-
cised. Even so late as 1846 Max Muller, fresh from
musical Leipzig, found that no young man, even if
qualified, would stoop to the music-stool in public,
and that to ask a Don to play " would have been
considered an insult " ; while Halle", visiting England
two years later, tells us that for a gentleman to be
able to play upon the piano was looked upon as a
sign of effeminacy, almost of vice. For by here-

1 His sister challenged the passage in writing to him :
"What do you mean by fourteen notes?" He answers : "I
had already been amused and provoked to find my gross
blunder about the 4 fourteen.' Pray do not suppose I doubled
the notes for semitones, though it looks very like it. The truth
is, I had a most stupid idea in my head that there were fifteen
semitones, and took off one for the octave. On reading it
over when published I saw the absurdity." — " Letters and Cor-
respondence," vol. ii. p. 411.

CALLIOPE IN THE THIRTIES 73

ditary prejudice the professional musician was
looked upon as an inferior, to be paid for his
services, to be kept socially at a distance. Prince
Hal bore much from Falstaff, but broke his head
for likening his father to a singing man at Windsor;
Mrs. Thrale, we know, was deserted and de-
nounced by all her friends, including ungrateful
Fanny Burney, for marrying the blameless music-
master, Piozzi. Stately Dr. Williams, when Head-
master of Winchester, took to hair-powder because
a lady mistook him for a bass singer in the cathe-
dral ; I shall recall later on the consternation felt
among the older men of Oxford, when Ouseley,
baronet, gentleman commoner, Master of Arts,
condescended to become Doctor of Music ; and
we all remember Mr. Osborne's contempt for the
" Honourables" to whom his daughter introduced
him — " Lords, indeed? Why, at one of her
swarreys I saw one of 'em speak to a dam fiddler,
a fellar I despise."

So music was relegated contemptuously to a
quasi-professional set, the chaplains, singing men,
Bible clerks, of the three choral Colleges ; its
Doctorate was a sham, the graduates not admitted
to the sacred scarlet semicircle in the Theatre ; its
Professor, with a salary of £12 a year, appearing
only at Commemoration to play the ramshackle old
organ in the Theatre. The Professor at that time
was Sir Henry Bishop, composer of deservedly
popular part-songs, but inferior as a musician to his
very eminent predecessor, Dr. Crotch. Of the
three organists only one was notable, Dr. Stephen
Elvey of New College, a good harmonist, an enthu-

74 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

siastic Handelian, though the loss of a leg prevented
him from playing pedal fugues, but of rough manner
and suspicious temper. On the death of his first
wife he had married, with rather unusual prompti-
tude, a pretty girl known as Perdita amongst the
New College undergraduates, who used to crowd
the " Slipe" gate on Sundays after service in order to
see her pass from Holywell Church. He presided
shortly afterwards at a concert, and the wag who
arranged its programme had inserted a glee by
his brother George, which appeared in the bill as
" Ah ! Why so soon— Elvey ? "

I remember the performance of Sir George
Elvey's Bachelor's exercise in the Music Room, I
think in 1838, when Stephen Elvey conducted in
the splendid robes which I then for the first time
saw, the new Bachelor sitting at the piano. The
choral services in the Chapels were not of a high
order, though individual voices of special sweetness
kept up their popularity. The finest adult singer
of that time was Jonathan Sawell, chaplain of New
College and Magdalen, who possessed the rare pure
Mario-like tenor, almost touching alto in the higher
range. He long survived his voice, singing with
husky wooden notes into the Fifties ; a cheery,
popular fellow, and an admirable oar ; he and
Moon of Magdalen, son to Alderman or Lord Mayor
Moon, placed on the river the first outrigger skiffs
seen at Oxford. His window in Magdalen, opposite
to the Physic Garden, was always beautifully floral ;
an adornment long since universal, peculiar then to
him and to Dr. Peter Maurice of New College. As
for the chorister boys, they ran wild. Their nominal

CALLIOPE IN THE THIRTIES 75

master at Magdalen was an elderly Fellow, George
Grantham, who came to a tragic end, falling out of
his window at bedtime into the deer park, and
found there next morning by his scout, dead with
a broken neck, the deer crowding round him in an
alarmed circle. His grave, with G. G. incised, is in
the corner of the cloisters between the chapel
door and the window opposite. There was a fire
in the antechapel at that time, and the surpliced
boys used as they passed it to deposit chestnuts and
potatoes, which they recovered, matura et coda, when
they came out. The New College brats were not
under better discipline. Many years ago, while
lionising some strangers in the Chapel, I observed
that the plaster wing of a sham oak angel had been
broken off, and from the crevice behind protruded
a piece of paper. I drew it out, yellow, stained,
and creased. I suppose that interest accrues even
to trivial personal records when ripened by the
lapse of years. We take no note to-day of a child's
naked footprint on the sand, but the impress of the
baby foot on the Roman villa floor at Brading is a
poem fertile in suggestion. So I copy the crumpled
fragment as it lies before me : " When this you find,
recall me to your mind. James Philip Hewlett,
Subwarden's chorister, April 26, 1796." There
follows the roll of boys ; then this edifying legend :
" Yeates just gone out of chapel, making as if
he was ill, to go to Botleigh with Miss Watson.
Mr. Prickett reads prayers. Mr. Lardner is now
reading the second lesson. Mr. Jenks read the
first. Slatter shams a bad Eye because he did not
know the English of the theme and could not do it.

76 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

A whole holiday yesterday being St. Mark. Only
the Subwarden of the Seniors at Prayers." This
last is significant. So we take our leave of naughty
Master James Philip Hewlett — "/, curre, little gown
boy," as dear Thacke- ay says.

The first pioneer of musical feeling in Oxford
was Jullien, an affected, grimacing, overdressed
Frenchman, but a clever maestro, whose brilliant
band played the dance and march music which set
elderly heads and bonnets wagging in imperfect
time, and who brought out excellent soloists. He
often came amongst us, and the men who heard
Koenig and Richardson at his concerts themselves
took up the cornet and the flute. Oppressive
practising d la Dick Swiveller prevailed ; but the
taste for music spread. It was found that Thai-
berg and Madame Dulcken would fill the Star
Assembly Room ; that scientific and high-priced
Chamber Quartetts, by Blagrove, Clementi, and the
Reinagles, brought to Wyatt's room fit audience
though few. In 1844 came Hullah ; large classes
working under him in Merton College Hall ; mature
and unmusical M.A.'s hammering away without
much result at the " From his low and grassy bed,"
which formed the Pons Asinorum of the Hullah
Manual. The practising soon died out ; but the
real musicians took the hint. An Amateur Society
was formed, with W. E. Jelf of Christchurch for its
president, Lord Seaham, afterwards Lord London-
derry, as secretary, a committee highly selected
and unprofessional : and, with the help of Grim-
met's band, concerts were given twice a term; at
which men since famous made their debut. Murray,

CALLIOPE IN THE THIRTIES 77

of Queen's, was there, who sang subsequently with
Louisa Pyne on the Opera stage at Boulogne ;
Thomson, afterwards Archbishop of York, sounded
his magnificent baritone, publicly heard before only
in the Boar's Head anthem upon Christmas Day ;
young Frederick Ouseley improvised at the piano ;
later on came the late Sir Herbert Oakeley, a slim
boyish figure, with a passion for Handel. Musical
talent was everywhere lying loose ; it needed some
one to combine it, and the someone was Dr. Corfe,
who succeeded Marshall at the Christchurch organ.
He formed classes of amateurs for practice of
classical music, training them laboriously in his
picturesque old house Beam Hall, in Merton Lane ;
until in 1847 they gave a public performance of
"Acis and Galatea," Corfe rolling his rs, Staudigl-
wise, in lt O ruddier than the cherry/' Mrs. Corfe
singing the exquisite Galatea solos. This was
followed by "The Antigone," by " Alexander's
Feast," and, more daring still, by Beethoven's Mass
in C. At the opening of the new Magdalen School
on May Day, 1851, an amateur choir, conducted by
Blyth, who had followed old Vickery at Magdalen,
performed, without instruments, a series of sacred
pieces. We sang, I remember, the Ave Verum,
lately brought to England by the Berlin choir;
Croft's "We will rejoice"; "Teach me, O Lord,"
and many more. Our great feat was a Cantata of
Bach's, which occupied twenty-one minutes, Blyth
informing us with pride at its close that we had
kept the pitch exactly. Amongst our performers
was old G. V. Cox the Bedel, survival from a
former age. He had been the first chorister whom

y8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Dr. Routh appointed more than half a century
before. Healthy development is apt to throw
down morbid outgrowths, manifested here in a
spurious but short-lived influx of the so-called
" Gregorian " music, a reversion to the modes
prevalent in Christian worship before the discovery
of counterpoint. The freak was ecclesiological,
not musical ; part of the general putting back of
clock hands which characterised the Church move-
ment of the time. It was adopted by some
amongst the clergy as a royal road to music,
traversable without knowledge and without train-
ing ; was rejected as an indefensible anachronism
by musicians, who noted the unsuitableness of the
" tones " to English words, their inexpressive bald-
ness unless sung in unison by eighty or a hundred
voices, the intolerable impropriety of appending to
them harmonies for English Church performance.
Meanwhile Ouseley brought his vast learning to pul-
verise the theory of their derivation from the Jewish
Temple service, pointing out that the melodic
intervals of Oriental music could have borne no
resemblance to the Greek system of tones and
semitones on which were founded the chants of the
ancient Western Church. It is recorded that an
old gentleman, whose time-honoured Sunday wor-
ship had been garnished by a new Rector with
" Gregorians," ventured to expostulate, but was
told that they were of consecrated antiquity, being
in fact the very tones to which David set the
Psalms. He deferred to the Rector's erudition, and
thanked him for explaining a passage in the Old
Testament which he had never understood before

CALLIOPE IN THE THIRTIES 79

—why it was, namely, that when David played the
harp before King Saul, Saul threw a javelin at him.
Whether, without its incipient musical awaken-
ing, Oxford would have gone crazy over Jenny
Lind in December, 1848, I cannot say. She came
as Stanley's guest, having stayed with his father
at the Palace when she sang at Norwich. The
Bishop, a little black figure, hopping about the
Cathedral aisles like Vincent Bourne's "Corni-
cula," was known locally as the Crow ; a nick-
name previously borne by his brother, Lord Stanley
of Alderley, the husband of Maria Josepha Holroyd;
and Jenny's visit produced the epigram : —

" Ornithologists ancient and modern attest
That the Cuckoo-bird visits the Nightingale's nest,
But not Stanley's own Alderley Bird-book can show1
That the Nightingale roosts in the nest of the Crow."

She sang in the Theatre, which was crowded from
area to roof ; here, as elsewhere, winning every
heart. That the sight of the interior with its
thousand black gowns should have impressed her
to tears is perhaps a tradition difficult of accept-
ance ; there were tears in the hearts if not in the
eyes of many amongst her hearers. Great was the
demand for her autograph ; most good-naturedly
she acceded to it. One undergraduate, who rushed
into poetry and sent her his effusion, still retains
her answer — the verse from Brady and Tate :

" Happy are they and only they,
Who from Thy judgments never stray,
Who know what's right, nor only so,
But also practise what they know,"

1 "A Familiar History of Birds," by the Rev. Edward Stanley,
Rector of Alderley, Cheshire (afterwards Bishop of Norwich).

8o REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

with " In remembrance of Jenny Lind," and the
date. On the day after the concert she came,
veiled and incognita, to New College Chapel : but
the Subwarden, Stacpoole, near whose stall she
sat, detected her. It happened that the Hall
was lighted and its piano open for the Thursday
glee club practice ; Stacpoole, after showing her
the Chapel, cunningly brought her on to see the
Hall, by this time filled with men, and uncere-
moniously asked if she would sing. She looked
surprised, but unaffectedly consented ; bade the
lady with her accompany, and sang to us a
cavatina from Der Freyschiitz. I remember her,
poising herself like a fisherman about to throw
a casting-net, before she flung out her wonderful
trills. Many years afterwards I heard her again
in Max Midler's drawing-room ; the old execution
was there ; the nightingale warble, the timbre-
argentin, was gone. She told us that A. P. Stanley,
who had no ear and hated music, or at least was
bored by it, usually left the room when she warbled.
But hearing her one day sing " I know that my
Redeemer liveth," he told her she had given him
an idea of what people mean by music. Only
once before, he said, the same feeling had come
over him, when in front of the Palace at Vienna
he had heard a tattoo performed by four hundred
drummers ! So, Eothen Kinglake, we are told,
also tone-deaf, astray by some mischance at a
matinee musicale, and asked by the hostess what
kind of music he preferred, answered — " I certainly
have a preference ; it is for the drum." One thinks
too of M. Jourdain's passion for la trompette marine.

CALLIOPE IN THE THIRTIES 81

Not till 1855 was music validly recognised by the
University ; that achievement was reserved for Sir
Frederick Ouseley. Sir Henry Bishop died ; the
appointment rested with the Proctors, and through
one of them, Holland of New College, a good
musician, it was conferred on Ouseley. The neces-
sary reforms were two : that the degree should
become a reality, and that the Professor should
not only profess, but teach. Hitherto any one
seeking the Mus.Doc. had merely to inscribe his
name as a nominal member of some College,
send in an orchestral thesis, which was invariably
accepted, pay a band for its performance, and take
rank as an Oxford Doctor. Ouseley instituted a
public examination by three competent examiners
in historical and critical knowledge of music, and
in elementary classics and mathematics, demand-
ing also from each candidate a lengthy written
composition to be submitted to himself. The
stringency of the test was shown by the fact that
in its early application fifty per cent, of the candi-
dates failed, not a few of the plucks being a judg-
ment on " cribbed exercises," which his immense
knowledge enabled him to expose. I remember
how the Professor, kindest-hearted of men, suffered
in inflicting rejections. He was beset by piteous,
even tearful, appeals, or by fierce expostulations ;
had sometimes to escape into a friend's house from
imploring remonstrants who chivied him in the
streets ; but he kept conscientiously to the line he
had drawn, with the result that in a few years' time
the Oxford Doctorate came to be estimated as it
had never been before. His lectures, somewhat

F

82 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

obscure and cramped in style, owed popularity
to the practical illustration of them on the organ
or piano by his friend Mr. Parratt, and to the
volunteer assistance of a well-coached vocal and
instrumental band. So at last Queen Calliope
came down from heaven and made a home in
Oxford. I am told she abides there still ; that
Ouseley's white and crimson mantle fell upon a
worthy Elisha, whose advent to St. Paul's had
been hailed by the innocent quatrain : —

" St. Paul's had a loss
In Dr. T. Goss ;
I'm sure it's a gainer
In Dr. J. Stainer;"

that by his promotion to the vacant Chair Oxford
was a gainer in her turn ; that if Sir Frederick
Ouseley made music respectable in the University,
Sir John Stainer made it beloved. But this is
more recent history; and the Neleian sovereign
old, though his confidences to Patroclus were
sometimes garrulous in their old-world reminis-
cence, never bored that Homeric Man Friday by
recapitulation of contemporary events.

" Plague on't, quoth Time to Thomas Hearne,
Whatever I forget, you learn."

NOTE. — A lady reading this chapter recognised her great-
grandfather in the recording chorister, Master James Philip
Hewlett. She tells me that he grew up to be Chaplain of
New College and Curate of St. Ebbe's, dying young. His
brother was the author of " Peter Priggins," mentioned on
page 85.

CHAPTER VII

UNDERGRADUATES IN THE THIRTIES

" The seedsman, Memory,

Sowed my deep-furrowed thought with many a Name,
Whose glory will not die"

— TENNYSON.

An old Diary — Oxford in the Thirties as depicted in Fiction — Its
more Essential Aspects — Some Great Undergraduates— And a
Great Tutor — "Tom" Acland — His Achievements at Oxford —
His Torrential Eloquence — The "Uniomachia" — Tom Brancker
— Solomon Caesar Malan — His Seventy Languages — Stanley —
Matthew Arnold — Clough — Thorold Rogers — A Kindly Action
— An Interchange of Amenities.

MANY years ago, with a collector's instinct, I ex-
humed for sixpence a ragged manuscript from the
rubbish heap of a Barbican bookstall. It was the
diary of an old Rugbeian, covering his residence
at Oxford through 1830 and 1831. His name was
Trevor Wheler, cadet of a Warwickshire family
living in their ancient manor-house at a village
called Leamington Hastings, and he came to Ox-
ford by the Regulator coach, going on to London
when the term was over on the box of the Royal
Defiance. The Trevor Whelers of to-day have
tried to identify the diarist. They think he was
Henry Trevor Wheler, who went to India, returned
and took Orders. His name, I think, spelled Wheeler,
occurs near the bottom of the M.A. list in my 1836

Oxford Calendar. I lent the manuscript to old

83

84 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Bloxam, the Rugby antiquary, who died without
returning it. This Wheler seems to have been a
quiet, orderly fellow : he kept morning chapel
strictly, went always to St. Mary's, where on one
occasion he heard Keble preach ; and usually read
a sermon in his own rooms on Sunday night. He
corresponds with several female Christian names,
and has written Byron's stanzas on " Woman,
lovely woman " in the first page of his journal, with
the date June I4th attached, evidently Comme-
moration Week. He gives frequent wine parties,
among the guests being Roundell and William
Palmer and Piers Claughton, and always carefully
records the number of corks he drew. He break-
fasts with Tommy Short of Trinity, of whom I
shall speak anon. He goes to New College Chapel,
and to the Tyrolese singers at the Music Room.
He frequents the Union, where seven men are
blackballed in one evening, where Acland senior
(the late Sir Thomas), is elected treasurer and
Gladstone secretary, and where debates are held
on Jewish disabilities, and on the superiority of
Byron to Shelley, Sunderland coming express from
Cambridge, with Arthur Hallam and Monckton
Milnes, to speak upon the latter theme. Sunder-
land, we may remember, was the contemporary
of Tennyson, who described him as "a very
plausible, Parliament-like, self-satisfied speaker at
the Union," and sketched him mercilessly in the
poem called "A Character." His sad story is told
in Sir Wemyss Reid's " Life of Lord Houghton "
(vol. L, p. 76). Wheler "sits" in the Little-Go
school, and hears a man construe spicea virga a

IN THE THIRTIES 85

" spicy virgin." He buys the new edition of the
Waverley Novels, and, attending Wise's sale-room,
has a lot of seventy books knocked down to him
for .£1, 2S. The composition is neither incisive,
eventful, nor picturesque ; but it is interesting, not
only as all diaries are interesting by lifting the
curtain of a fellow-mortal's mental privacy, but
as raising from the shades with contemporary
vividness the Undergraduate Oxford of seventy-
seven years ago.

We may read of this Oxford in forgotten novels :
its vulgar side in Hewlett's " Peter Priggins " ; its
rollicking side in Dickinson's "Vincent Eden,"
published in Bentley's Miscellany, and abruptly
ceasing through pressure on the editor, it was
believed, from apprehensive University authorities.
In " Loss and Gain " we have its obscurantist side,
due to the author's teaching; the picked men of
ability in its pages — Sheffield, Reding, Carlton —
ranging over not high themes of philosophy,
science, culture, but the nightmares of Tractarian
theology and the characteristics of a true Church.
Mere foils were men like those, setting off the
nobler Oxford of their time ; and never in the
history of the University has a decade opened
and progressed amid a group so brilliant. In 1830
we have Gladstone, Liddell, Charles Wordsworth,
Hope, T. Acland, Manning, Church, Halford
Vaughan, William Adams, Walter Hamilton, Lords
Dalhousie, Elgin, Lincoln, Canning, to take names
almost at random. Nor was this dawn of golden
times confined to Oxford ; at Cambridge in the
very same year gathered a not less rare group

86 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

of conjurati fratres : Spedding, Thomson, Brook-
field, Trench, Tennyson, Monckton Milnes, Charles
Duller, Merivale, Arthur Hallam, Kinglake, Ster-
ling. There is deep pathos in these sparkling
catalogues. We see the band of friends, cheerful,
united, sanguine, starting together on life's path.
Pass sixty years, we check the list, to find a
scattered remnant of survivors, telling sadly of
havoc wrought in their train by the storms of
life, themselves too often alienated at its close.
But the record of their deeds survives. Outworn,
disappointed, hostile, not one of them lived in
vain. The severances of party and of creed are
incidents of independent warfare ; but the soul
that is fervent and heroic not only fights its own
way to perfection, but makes ignoble sloth more
odious, brings high aim within the readier grasp
of the generation and the men who follow it.

" And O, blithe breeze ! and O, great seas,

Though ne'er, that earliest parting past,
On your wide plain they join again,

Together lead them home at last.
One port, methought, alike they sought,

One purpose hold where'er they fare —
O, bounding breeze ! O, rushing seas !

At last, at last, unite them there ! "

First among the Oxford comrades of that time,
juvenum publica cura, universal undergraduate
theme, ranked Charles Wordsworth ; tutor to
Gladstone and Manning, to Sir Francis Doyle and
Walter Hamilton, Acland, Hope, Lords Lincoln
and Canning ; the best scholar, cricketer, oar,
skater, racquet player, dancer, pugilist, of his day.

CHARLES WORDSWORTH
From the Richmond Portrait

IN THE THIRTIES 87

His proficiency in this last branch of antique
athletics was attested by a fight at Harrow between
himself and Trench, which sent the future Arch-
bishop to a London dentist, in order to have his
teeth set to rights. "That man," whispered Lord
Malmesbury to Lord Derby, when Wordsworth
had shaken hands with the Chancellor on receiving
his honorary degree, "that man might have been
anything he pleased." His attainments and capa-
cities were set off by an unusually tall and hand-
some figure,

Gratior et pulchro veniens in corpore virtus.

His aunt, the Poet's wife, told me that of all
the young men she had ever known he was the
most charming in manner, mind, and person. He
was beyond all his contemporaries an adept in
Greek and Latin versification ; whatever of noble
thought, of touching sentiment, of transient
humour, gained access to his mind, came draped
in one or other of the classic tongues. His grief
at his wife's death found expression in a perfect
Latin couplet, untranslated, untranslatable.1 A
junior boy whom he once found eating cake in
" Meads " at Winchester, artlessly offered him a
piece, which he accepted, sending to the boy next
day a pile of cakes and cream from the confec-
tioner, with the note,

(Requiting guerdon, cake for cake, receive) ;

and his very inscriptions in hotel books when on
a tour were Greek Iambics.2 His career as Master

1 Appendix E. 2 Ibid.

88 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

in College at Winchester justified the promise of
his youth : he raised the scholarship as well as
the morality of the boys. His Greek Grammar
was accepted by every school in England except
Eton, which, preferring to go wrong with Plato,
clung to its old inferior manual ; and he imparted
to Winchester a tone of unaffected, thoughtful
piety which long outlived his rule. At Gladstone's
entreaty — High Churchmen saw in the reviving
Episcopal Church of Scotland a happy hunting
ground for English Tractarianism — he undertook
the Headship of Glenalmond College, becoming
soon afterwards Bishop of St. Andrews. It was
a sacrifice ; had he remained in England he was
to have been Dean of Rochester. Through no
fault of his own he failed as Warden ; as Bishop
he did all that man could do, but the post was
not worthy of his powers ; and the illustrious
Oxford paragon ended, like his Swedish name-
sake, amid the trivial surroundings of a petty
fortress and a barren strand. Having been his
pupil in early years, I reviewed his Autobiography
in a London Weekly. He was pleased by my
notice of him, sought my name, and we exchanged
many letters lively with memories of the past.
The last I received from him was a New Year
Greeting, with closing invocation of multos felices
annos, ultimum felicissimum. It was his own
annus ultimus ; he died before the day came
round again.

One more confederate in this i'epa veorijs, this
sacred band of youthful brothers, let me com-
memorate. Double First Class, when Double

IN THE THIRTIES 89

Firsts meant much, Fellow of All Souls, heir to
beautiful Killerton with its mighty trap rocks,
forest scenery, wild ponies, and red deer, Mr. or
" Tom " Acland, as every one called him, was
heralded into public life by unusual expectations.
He was in Parliament for a time, made no great
mark, married, early lost his wife, threw himself
heartbroken into agriculture, under the tuition of
his friend and relative Philip Pusey. He came
late to his inheritance, for the Aclands are a
longaeval race, and old Sir Thomas lived to a great
age. The contrast between them was amusing ;
the father with manners regal in their measured
graciousness and polish, the son jerky and dis-
cursive in talk, movement, ideas. " Tom thinks
so fast," said a near relation, " that none of us
can keep up with him." During the Fifties it was
my rlot to see a good deal of him in Oxford : he
used to walk with me in the streets, recalling his
early life, the Newmania and its influence on his
mental growth, his association with the (< Young
England " movement, whose last surviving repre-
sentative was the late Duke of Rutland. Stopping
opposite to St. Mary Magdalen Church one day,
he told me how he and Jacobson had taken there
F. D. Maurice, when an undergraduate, to be
baptised. He was full at that time of the " Middle
Class Examinations," which, with Canon Brereton,
he had initiated in Devonshire, and which de-
veloped ultimately into the Oxford Local Exa-
minations. To him especially, to his experience
of West Buckland School, his patience, wisdom,
and enthusiasm, that great educational experiment

90 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

was due. I remember, too, that we went together
to Max Miiller's opening lecture on Comparative
Mythology ; he was disturbed, fidgeted, bit his
nails. " It frightens one," he said. I was reading
the " Odyssey " with a pupil one day ; he came in,
and I handed him a book ; he listened for ten
minutes, then gave me back the volume, saying :
u How quickly one forgets ! but for the Latin
translation at the foot I could not have followed " ;
going on to tell me how with Bunsen and Philip
Pusey he used to read Homer daily through a
winter in Rome, and imitating Bunsen's Conti-
nental pronunciation of the sonorous lines.

In 1865 I gave evidence on School Teaching of
Science before the Schools Inquiry Commission, of
which he was a member. He questioned me at
great length as to examination methods, as to the
machinery needful for extending the local examina-
tion to the public schools, as to the desirableness of
a Government Board of Higher Education, with
a special Minister at its head. He became some-
what iterative ; and the chairman, Lord Taunton,
cut him short ; he rose with an impatient gesture
and went to the fire, but said to me afterwards,
" I kept my temper." We travelled down to
Oxford together ; he was in high spirits, having
just re-entered Parliament after twenty years of
exile, and poured forth optimistic talk. My sceptical
interjections grated on him once or twice ; he was
uneasy, too, lest my science teaching should over-
shadow the imaginative and reverential side of the
boy-mind. " Don't be too materialistic," he shouted
into my cab from the pavement, as I dropped him

IN THE THIRTIES 91

at his brother's house in Broad Street. Yet again
I was to know him, in his home at Killerton. I
had left Tatmton School : and finding that I was
uncertain as to my next move, he made me his
Chaplain, and put his house at Sprydoncote at my
disposal for a time ; an act of kindness for which I
shall ever think of him with gratitude. He was now
Sir Thomas — a far abler man than his father in all
the higher requirements of a great country gentle-
man's position, yet, somehow, never filling his
father's place in local sentiment ; less outwardly
imposing, less captivating, suasive, patriarchal. I
saw him constantly ; he used to drop in and talk
on the winter afternoons. He was not a man of
reminiscences, nor did his speech linger on scholar-
ship and books ; present problems, social chiefly and
theological, seemed to fill his mind. He would
question me repeatedly as to my own mental
development, wishing to trace the process by which
High Church rigidity in the green salad-days
changed into independent rationalism later on. He
was devoted to agriculture, of which I had some
experience ; to allotments, to cottage building in its
sanitary, profitable, moral aspects. My microscope,
which stood constantly in employ, used to puzzle
him — he always went to see what new marvel I had
got, with an ever-renewed protest against the cult
of the infinitely little.

He was not amcebaean in his talk ; it sped forth
torrential, and you had to listen ; it fascinated for
the first half-hour, then to the hearer followed loss
of sequence, logical perplexity, swamped surrender,
boredom, headache, desperation. I once compared

92 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

notes with a kindred patient, who had the day be-
fore dined with him tete-d-tete. He described the
eloquence, so genial in its opening, endurable
during dinner by manducative and bibulous
supports, by degrees assuming nightmare pro-
portions, tempered only with faith in inevitable
bedtime. That arrived, the good- nights were
spoken, the staircase reached ; and then, stimulated
by a fresh cestrus, the host began again, and the
evening closed with a long supplementary harangue
in the hall by the light of the bedroom candlesticks.
This habit made him in society the terror of
raconteurs, demanding as they do attentive auditors
with interlocution just enough to start successive
topics and give fresh chances to their wit. I recall
meeting at his table Mr. Massey, M.P. for Tiverton,
one of the brilliant London talkers of the day, a
member, with Kinglake, Count Stzrelecki, American
Ticknor, and others, of the famous Athenaeum
" corner." He led off at the opening of dinner
with a delicious anecdote of the well-known Mrs.
Thistlethwayte ; but his incidental mention of a
certain other lady inspired Sir Thomas to interrupt
with a genealogical disquisition : the aroma of the
story exhaled, and the narrator looked depressed.
He recovered himself, and another good story was
begun ; but when a second time Sir Thomas cut in
mat apropos, Mr. Massey collapsed, and we heard no
more of him. And so in this and other ways it
came to pass that with all his great attainments he
was not a man with whom you ever felt at ease.
That he would be polite and kind you knew ; knew,
too, that until submerged by vocables, as Carlyle

IN THE THIRTIES 93

said of Coleridge, you would gain abiding know-
ledge from his boundless stores ; yet everywhere
in his talk and temperament lurked sharp points
on which you feared to tread — the conversational
smoothness was suppositus cineri doloso. It used to
be said that God made men, women, and Aclands,
(it was said, I think, originally of the Herveys), and
he lent full flavour to the epigram. He gave one
always the idea of a superlatively good thing un-
kindly impaired by Fate. To his birth thronged the
fairy god-mother with gifts of intellect, fluency,
loftiness of standard, philanthropy of aim, gene-
rosity of nature ; then came the malignant Un-
invited, with the marring supplement of position,
fortune, ease, to annul the bracing, shaping discipline
which moulds the self-made man. Covered with
University distinctions, Fellow of All Souls, rich in
Parliamentary promise, protagonist in a great social
and religious movement — all older men looked on
at him expectantly with a Ce gar$on ira loin. But
inherited wealth absolved him from compulsory
struggle, rank and repute secured him unearned
deference — he was admirable, useful, honoured,
loved ; but he disproved the augury of greatness,
he failed to realise the promise heralded by his
splendid youth.

Faster than Homer's leaves the Undergraduate
generations pass. Three years, or four at most,
push them from their stools, and a fresh succession
enters on the stage. In 1833 the " Uniomachia,"
Battle of the Union, embalms another scarcely
less remarkable relay.

94 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

I well knew Tom Brancker, who was believed
to be dux factij originator of the social war.
Coming from Shrewsbury in jacket and turn-
down collars, he had, while still a schoolboy,
though matriculated, beaten Gladstone and Scott
for the Ireland. Butler had sent him up by Scott's
advice, for the sake of practice merely, but he
came out scholar, surpassing his two great com-
petitors, as Vowler Short told them, in the points
of taste and terseness. He failed afterwards to
get his First, but became Fellow of Wadham, and
dropped finally into the lotos-eating of a College
incumbency. He was hated and dreaded as a bully
in the Schools, but I always found him kind and
friendly. It was usual, as matter of course and
compliment, to re-elect each year the committee
of the Union ; but just then was the time of the
Reform Bill, the outgoing committee was Tory ;
and Brancker, with Bob Lowe, Massie, and other
zealous Whigs, successfully opposed them, and
were elected in their place. The exiles formed an
opposition club called the Rambler, so popular
and successful that the new committee proposed
to expel its members from the Union. In hope
of lulling the storm, two St. Mary Hall men,
Jackson and Sinclair, produced the " Uniomachia,"
a mock Homeric poem with a dog-Latin Inter-
pretatio and notes, and, in a second edition, with
an additional " Notularum Spicilegium " by Robert
Scott, afterwards Master of Balliol. There followed
an English translation from the pen of Archdeacon
Giles, and an "Emollient and Sedative Draught"
by Lenient Lullaby, F.R.S., whom I have never

IN THE THIRTIES 95

been able to identify. The characters, besides
the three innovators, were Cardwell, W. G. Ward,
Roundell Palmer, Mayow, Tait, Pattison, and
Charles Marriott. The fun fell upon the combatants
like Virgil's pulveris exigui jactus on the bees, and
the hatchet was buried in a reconciliation dinner
at the Star. Of Marriott I shall speak later on,
as also of Mark Pattison, who in these years, not
yet disappointed, melancholy, and vindictive, was
struggling with undigested reading, half-awakened
intelligence, morbid self-consciousness, progressing
towards that love of learning for learning's sake
which, agnostic, cynic, pessimist as he was, gave
unity to his sad, remonstrant life.

Contemporary with these was a genius perhaps
more remarkable, certainly more unusual, than
any of them. In 1833 Solomon Caesar Malan
matriculated at St. Edmund's Hall, a young man
with a young wife, son to a Swiss Pastor, speaking
as yet broken English, but fluent Latin, Romaic,
French, Spanish, Italian, German ; and a proficient
at twenty-two years old in Hebrew, Arabic, San-
skrit. He won the Boden and the Kennicott
Scholarships, took a Second Class, missing his
First through the imperfection of his English, was
ordained, became Professor in Calcutta, gathered
up Chinese, Japanese, the various Indian, Malay,
Persian tongues, came home to the valuable living
of Broadwinsor, where he lived, when not travelling,
through forty years, amassing a library in more
than seventy languages, the majority of which he
spoke with freedom, read familiarly, wrote with
a clearness and beauty rivalling the best native

96 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

caligraphy. In his frequent Eastern rambles he
was able, say his fellow-travellers, to chat in
market and bazaar with every one whom he met.
On a visit to the Bishop of Innereth he preached a
Georgian sermon in the Cathedral. He published
twenty - six translations of English theological
works, in Chinese and Japanese, Arabic and
Syriac, Armenian, Russian, Ethiopic, Coptic.
Five-fold outnumbering the fecundity of his royal
namesake, he left behind him a collection of
16,000 Proverbs, taken from original Oriental texts,
each written in its native character and translated.
So unique was the variety of his Pentecostal attain-
ments that experts could not be found even to
catalogue the four thousand books which he pre-
sented, multa gemens, with pathetic lamentation
over their surrender, to the Indian Institute at
Oxford.

I encountered him at three periods of his life.
First as a young man at the evening parties of
John Hill, Vice-Principal of St. Edmund's Hall,
where prevailed tea and coffee, pietistic Low
Church talk, prayer and hymnody of portentous
length, yet palliated by the chance of sharing Bible
or hymn-book with one of the host's four charming
daughters. Twenty years later I recall him as a
guest in Oxford Common Rooms, laying down the
law on questions of Scriptural interpretation, his
abysmal fund of learning and his dogmatic insist-
ency floated by the rollicking fun of his illustrations
and their delightful touches of travelled personal
experience. Finally, in his old age I spent a long
summer day with him in the Broadwinsor home,

IN THE THIRTIES 97

enjoying his library, aviary, workshop, drawings ;
his hospitality stimulated by the discovery that in
some of his favourite pursuits I was, longo intervallo,
an enthusiast like himself. He was a benevolently
autocratic vicar, controlling his parish with patri-
archally imperious rule, original, racy, trenchant,
in Sunday School and sermons. It was his wont
to take into the pulpit his college cap : into it he
had pasted words of Scripture which he always
read to himself before preaching. They were
taken from the story of Balaam : " And the Lord

opened the mouth of the ass, and she said "

He died at eighty-two, to have been admitted, let
us hope, in the unknown land to comradeship of
no ordinary brotherhood by spirits of every nation,
kindred, tongue ; to have found there, ranged upon
celestial shelves, the Platonic archetypes of the
priceless books which it tore his mortal heart to
leave.

Skip two or three more years, and we come to a
scarcely less interesting student stratum, to the
period of Stanley, Matthew Arnold, Clough. Think
of them walking among the Cumnor cowslips and
the fritillaries of the Eynsham river side, bathing in
the abandoned lasher, noting from Hinksey Hill on
winter afternoons the far-off light of the windows
in Christchurch Hall, mounting to the Glanvil elm,
which yet stands out clear against the flaming sun-
set sky. Imagine the talk, now glad, now pensive,
of their still illusioned youth ; its poetry, specu-
lation, criticism, Wordsworthian insight into nature,
valiant optimism, rare communion of highest and

G

98 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

most sacred thoughts; — as one reads "Thyrsis"
and "The Scholar Gypsy," airs from Paradise seem
to breathe around one, airs which only Oxford
could have inspired, only high natures such as
theirs could have exhaled. I heard Stanley recite
his " Gypsies" in the Theatre in 1837 > *ne scene
comes back to me as of yesterday — the crowded
area, the ladies in their enormous bonnets ; hand-
some, stately Dr. Gilbert in the Vice-Chancellor's
chair ; the pale, slight, weak-voiced, boyish figure
in the rostrum ; the roar of cheers which greeted
him. Clough, too, I knew ; read with him for half
a year in his tiny Holywell lodging immediately
after his election to Oriel, working the first hour in
the morning, while he ate his frugal breakfast of
dry bread and chocolate. It was his happy time,
before his piping took a troubled sound ; his six
golden Oxford graduate years of plain living and
high thinking, of hopeful fight for freedom, of the
rapturous Long Vacations in Wales, the Highlands,
the English Lakes, summed up immortally in his
"Bothie." The original edition in its blue cloth
lies before me as I write, a present from his son. I
have noted in it the undergraduates represented, so
far as they are now recoverable.1 Side by side
with these men were Donkin, Lord Hobhouse,
Brodie, Henry Acland, young gentleman-commoner
Ruskin ; little, white-haired, cherub-faced Jowett ;
James Riddell, whose <£0*W>, fydivay, <j)i\ta-Trj, Moberly
used to quote as the unsurpassable gem of all the
Anthologies ; and, perhaps a year or two earlier,
"Jem " Lonsdale, great in estimation rather that in
1 Appendix F,

IN THE THIRTIES 99

production as a scholar, the tales of his wit and
genius ephemeral and for the most part lost. Let
me give one specimen. Asked to preach at Eton
by his old tutor, Bishop Chapman, he sent this
answer : —

" Cur imparem me cingis honoribus,
Me, triste lignum, me vetulum, pigro
Sermone, fundentemque tardo
Ore soporiferum papaver ? "

Henry Furneaux, who was his colleague in the
Moderation Schools, used to speak of him as the
most winning of men from his extreme simplicity
and absence of all self-consciousness ; his scholar-
ship not so much an acquirement as an intuition,
inherited probably from his father. It was amongst
the answers to a Paper set by him that occurred the
delicious explanation of the Lupercalia, " Lupercalia
is the name of a she-wolf that suckled Romeo and
Juliet." Riddell's quiet manner concealed a turn
for comedy. I once saw him in a charade act with
much humour the Parliamentary Candidate in the
gentlemanly interest, opposing Henry Wall, who
was the demagogue. And one day at Zermatt, the
party being bored by a cockney who was destitute
of Miss Catherine Fanshawe's letter, and was afraid
of losing his 'at on the mountain, Riddell wrote in
the hotel book : —

" A gent who was late at Zermatt,
Dropped an H on the Hoch Taligat ;
If he'll fetch it away
He'll find it some day
Of use in the front of his 'at."

He was thus embalmed by a contemporary poet.

ioo REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

" The other, of an ancient name, erst dear

To Border hills, though thence too long exiled ;

In lore of Hellas scholar without peer,

Reared in grey halls on banks of Severn piled.

Reserved he was, of few words and slow speech ;
Yet dwelt strange power that beyond words could reach
In that sweet face by no rude thought defiled."

The Forties were years of strife ; of Ward's ex-
pulsion, Newman's perversion, Hampden's chal-
lenged bishopric ; a time none the less of great
youthful names. Thorold Rogers I knew slightly
as an undergraduate. He was then a loud, domi-
nating, rapid talker, deluging his company with a
shower-bath of Greek choruses, not more regardful
of the skins into which he poured the wine of his
erudition than was Tom Jones when in company
with Ensigns Northerton and Adderley. He so
frightened men, in fact, that he could find no
College to take him as a Fellow. Altered and
saddened by his young wife's death, he plunged
into politics as a relief, obtained the Act of Parlia-
ment which enabled him to resign his Orders, and
sat in the House of Commons till not long before
his death, valued there as a walking dictionary,
and always the centre of a laughing group in the
smoking-room or on the Terrace. From this time
I knew him closely; we stood together on many
political platforms, and I pleased him by an appre-
ciative review in The Spectator of his book on
Holland, which had been coarsely attacked, as I
thought, in The Pall Mall. He was an unequalled
story-teller ; some men affect nonchalance in re-
peating a good thing, but Rogers's face used to
flash and his eyes start out with contagious joy in a

IN THE THIRTIES

101

clever saying. That football is the accomplishment
of a hippopotamus, that the Athanasian Creed was
an election squib — a saying Rogeresque but justi-
fied, as readers of Foulkes's investigation are
aware — and his happy comparison of a serious,
hairy-faced Birmingham M.P. to a costive terrier,
are amongst his countless epigrams which occur to
me. His was the pun which disqualified Mundella
of the big nose, 6 peyaXoppwos, as Chairman of
Committees, because "when Mr. Mundella was in
the Chair the Noes would always have it." Some
prolix creature had told one day in the House
the ancient story of a miser swallowing a guinea,
from whose niggard interior an emetic persuaded
him to refund only ten and sixpence. Rogers
seized a pencil, scribbled and handed round the
following : —

X#€§ VO/UK&S S€KJ diroKpiJ^uv Kar^^po^dic

KCU /3w$€ts Odvarov IIpo/cXcs e'Seicre fiopov.
vvv &€ /xoyis T*Xvi? napaKeAaov BrjOcv iarpov

rdv Se rpiutv ptpiStov y\L<T\p(i)<s ctTrevoax^icrc 8iir\fjv
dvOpwTTov yacTTrjp, TTJV 8e /career x' IBiav.

Translated in the manner of Swift : —

" Attorney Proclus, so they say,

Swallowed ten drachmas 'tother day.
He choked, he gasped ; to ease his ill

Came Paracelse with purge and pill.
Seven coins the emetic spew obeyed —

Cries Proclus, ' Curse your plundering trade !
Of my loved store three-fourths are gone ;

So help you Plutus, leave me one !'"

102 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

When news came down to the Lobby of Lord
Derby's death, he wrote : —

" Reckless in speech, and truculent in face,

Geoffrey, the fourteenth Earl of Derby, died :
Only in this superior to his race,

He left the winning for the losing side."

He used to quote, as the cleverest retort ever made,
the answer of a notorious admiral to the Duke of
Clarence : " I hear, sir, that you are the biggest
blackguard in Portsmouth ! " " I hope your Royal
Highness has riot come down to take away my
character ! " I met him one day laughing along
Beaumont Street ; he had just overheard a scout
talking to a waiter at the door of the Randolph :
" So he says to me, his lordship says, 'You don't
seem to think much of them bishops.' 'No, my
lord, I don't,' says I ; ' I remember them all coming
up here with pockmantles not worth five shillings,
and now they're as fat as Moses's kine.' " Beneath
his coarseness and profanity lay not only political
morality and ardent patriotism but active kindness
of heart. A clever girl at Somerville had exhausted
her funds after two years' residence and was about
to leave. Rogers heard of it, told the circum-
stances about the House in his forcible way till he
had collected ^80, which he sent to the young
lady, who is now a successful and distinguished
professor. Of his bons mots the majority, perhaps,
will not bear repetition ; there was truth as well as
pungency in the saying which explained his writing
a book on Holland by the fact that it is "a low
country full of dams." When Freeman came up
to examine in the newly-founded History school,

IN THE THIRTIES

103

he and Rogers, an equally ursine pair, were mali-
ciously brought together at a dinner party. In
compliment to Rogers the host led the talk to
political economy. " Political economy," said
Freeman, " seems to me to be so much garbage."
" Garbage is it ? " said Rogers ; " the very thing
then for a hog like you." Readers of Walter
Scott's note in Boswell (vol. v. p. 114) will recall
the meeting between Adam Smith and Dr. Johnson.

CHAPTER VIII
MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES

" Prceteritos extollens, Recentiorum incuriosus"

— CICERO.

Goldwin Smith—John Conington — Hayman and Rugby and More-
decay — Frank Buckland — J. G. Wood — His Many-sidedness —
The "Common Object" — Blaydes of Oxford and Calverley of
Cambridge— R. E. Bartlett — The Schoolboy and the Queen —
Walter Wren — The Great Henley Race of 1843 : "Sept em contra
Camum "—George Cox— " Black Gowns and Red Coats "—The
Early Fifties— Harry Wilkins — Herbert Coleridge — His Mother,
Sara Coleridge — Dress at Oxford Fifty Years Ago and Now —
Unathletic Oxford — The Supremacy of the Spirit.

GOLDWIN SMITH — "vastiest Goldwin/' Rolleston
always called him — towered above his fellows as
undergraduate and bachelor. We all saw in him
the coming man ; but he married, settled in
America, and never came. Close to him was John
Conington, whose extraordinary visage, with its
green-cheese hue, gleaming spectacles, quivering
protrusive lips, might be encountered every day
at 2 o'clock on his way to a constitutional, which
he would have liked, he said, to conduct between
two high walls, shutting out all irrelevant topics
such as surroundings and scenery might suggest.
He ranked in Oxford as a scholar of the very highest
character and industry, attested by his fine trans-
lations of Horace and of Virgil. He was a lonely,

MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 105

melancholy man, out of harmony with the young
athletes who were his pupils ; prevented from
voluntary advances to them by his own insuperable
shyness ; but eagerly making friends with any who
would seek his confidence, and sparing no pains
with promising students. He was passionately
fond of the best English poets, by whom he illus-
trated his classical teaching. His pupils learned
from him what University teaching should have
been, learned too how its realisation was made
impossible by the imperfection of previous public
school training. From an esprit and a Liberal he
suddenly became Conservative and Puseyite ; died
early, leaving a profuse diary of his Oxford life,
which his executors unfortunately thought it their
duty to destroy. In the same class list with
Goldwin Smith and Freeman, a Second where
they were Firsts, stood the name of Hayman, the
unfortunate ad interim Headmaster of Rugby. I
first met him in our younger days on the top of
a Devonshire coach. I was quoting Pope's
" Character of Narcissa," and hesitated for a
word, which a voice behind me supplied, and its
owner joined in our talk with spirit. He was a
pleasant fellow and a good scholar, though what
the waiter in the " Newcomes " would call a
11 harbitrary gent " ; but his election to Rugby
was unfortunate for everybody. Only a Hercules
could have succeeded an Atlas such as Temple ;
and Hayman's inferiority in generalship, teaching,
preaching, capacity for work, at once armed
against him boys and masters. His forlorn posi-
tion won him public sympathy, but the numbers

106 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

fell ; it became clear even to the Philistines who
had appointed him that he must go : —

" When Rugby, spite of priest or layman,

Began to fall away,
The Governors suspended Hayman
For fear of More-decay."

The next year brings us to Frank Buckland.
Few men can now recall those unique breakfasts
at Frank's rooms in the corner of Fell's Buildings ;
the host, in blue pea-jacket and German student's
cap, blowing blasts out of a tremendous wooden
horn ; the various pets who made it difficult to
speak or move ; the marmots, and the dove, and
the monkey, and the chameleon, and the snakes,
and the guinea-pigs ; the after-breakfast visits to
the eagle, or the jackal, or the pariah dog, or
Tiglath-pileser the bear, in the little yard outside,
" Why Tiglath-pileser ? " several inquiring corre-
spondents asked me ; " why give unexplained these
cryptic names and jokes of long ago ? " Thus
it was. On a certain morning in May the bear
escaped from Buckland's yard, and found his way
into the chapel, at the moment when a student was
reading the first Lesson, 2 Kings xvi., and had
reached the point at which King Ahaz was on his
way to meet Tiglath-pileser, King of Assyria, at
Damascus. So far as that congregation was con-
cerned, the meeting never came off ; the bear made
straight for the Lectern, its occupant fled to his
place, and the half-uttered name on his lips was
transferred to the intruder. Gaisford sent for
Frank : " You or that animal, Mr. Buckland, must
quit the College." The undergraduate was father

MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 107

of the man. His house in Albany Street became
one of the sights of London ; but to enter it pre-
supposed iron nerves and dura ilia. Introduced
to some five-and-twenty poor relations, free from
shyness, deeply interested in your dress and person,
you felt as if another flood were toward, and the
animals parading for admission to the Ark. You
remained to dine : but, as in his father's house
so in his own, the genius of experiment, supreme
in all departments, was nowhere so active as at the
dinner table. Panther chops, rhinoceros pie, bison
steaks, kangaroo ham, horse's tongue, elephant's
trunk, are recorded among his manifestations of
hospitality ; his brother-in-law quotes from the
diary of a departing guest — " Tripe for dinner;
don't like crocodile for breakfast."

Of the same standing — acquaintances I think
they were not — was ]. G. Wood, the well-known
lecturing naturalist. He was a Bible clerk of
Merton, of the class typified in Tom Brown's
" Hardy," one of two pariahs compelled by chill
penury to accept the coarse munificence of the
College, who pricked Chapel attendance and said
grace, knowing no one, living alone, dining in Hall
alone on the remnants sent from the high table. I
used to go with him down the river in the Long
Vacation, with gun, fishing rod, collecting net. He
was a redoubtable athlete, champion of the St. Cle-
ment's gymnasium ; for Maclaren's rooms were not
then built, though he had come lately to Oxford,
succeeding little Angelo, who taught fencing to the
previous generation. Wood was skilled and im-
perturbable at singlestick, and a first-rate boxer. I

io8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

saw him once put on the gloves with Maclaren
at Parson's Pleasure when both were stripped
for a bathe, hitting Mac in the face during the
first round, and receiving the good-natured pro-
fessional's warm congratulations. Large - boned
and muscular, he had a small, facile, lady -like
hand ; was a dexterous anatomist ; many of his dis-
sections being still in the Museum ; mounted skil-
fully for the microscope, manufactured for himself
electrical and optical apparatus, took calotypes, as
photographs were called before the collodion pro-
cess was invented, drew spirited caricatures. He
was not then, if ever, a scientific naturalist ; he
picked up knowledge as he went on, and cleverly
made the most of it ; and his authorship was due
to accident. He was intimate with Buckley, a
Christchurch chaplain, who did cribs for Rout-
ledge ; the publisher asked him to recommend a
man who could produce for moderate payment a
popular work on Natural History, and Buckley
named Wood. He accepted, and came to me
for suggestions, which I gave rather inventively.
The bull terrier "Crab" who figures in his first
book was mine ; some of that quadruped's recorded
feats, with other surprising incidents, one in par-
ticular of a pointer standing at a pig, were, I fear,
not founded on fact. But the little book had a
great sale, was followed by "Common Objects of
the Country," and led to a long series of more
pretentious works. Wood was ordained to the
curacy of St. Thomas, then, under " Tom " Cham-
berlain, of Christchurch, the most ritualistic of
Oxford temples ; in doubt to the last moment

:

MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 109

whether he was to serve under Chamberlain or
under a Low Church friend of Ben Symons, he bid
the tailor leave his clerical waistcoat uncompleted,
that it might be open or M.B. according to his
rector's tenets. He made no mark as a clergyman,
his vocation lay in writing and in lecturing. Plain
in features and rough in dress — men called him the
" Common Object" — and with a somewhat indis-
tinct voice, he was yet on the platform extraor-
dinarily popular, fascinating, by his anecdotic itch,
as Peter Pindar calls it, and his skill in blackboard
drawing, not certainly scientific or highly cultivated
hearers, but the half-educated intelligence of a
middle-class or schoolboy audience. He died sud-
denly while at work, struck down on a lecturing
tour.

1 pass to a very different man, who came up to
Oxford as Blaydes in 1847, and left it in 1849 to
be better known as Calverley at Cambridge : his
encounters with the little " Master," the stone
thrown up at his library window, the " Well,
yellow-belly, how's Jinks ? " the surmise at Col-
lections that it might perhaps be some time since
the Master had read Longinus, were long current
in Balliol. When one of his escapades made it
probable that the authorities would invite him
to adorn with his liveliness the groves of some
other Academe, R. E. Bartlett, afterwards Fellow
of Trinity, wrote : —

" Oh, freshman, redolent of weed,
Oh, scholar, running fast to seed,
This maxim in thy meerschaum put —
The sharpest Blades will soonest cut."

no REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD
He answered: —

" Your verse is tolerable ; but
My case you understand ill ;
For though the Dons want Blades to cut,
They cannot find a handle."

Bartlett's, too, were the lines on Weatherby, a fast
scholar of Balliol, who was sent down for being
drunk in Quad, and prostrating the porter who
tried to get him to bed : —

" Why was his term, at first so short,

Cut prematurely shorter ?
The reason was, he floored the Port,
And then— he floored the Porter."

The catastrophe occurred in the lt short" three-
week summer term, which gives point to the
opening line. Conversing with an old Harrovian
the other day, I asked what sort of reputation
Blaydes left behind him at the school. Not, it
appeared, for wit and verse-writing, but as the only
boy who ever jumped from the top to the bottom
of the old school steps. So Matthew Arnold's leap
over the Wadham railings used to be familiar to
many who had never read his books ; so a clever boy
named Selwyn earned immortality at Winchester by
jumping for a bet over " Nevy's hedge " into the
road far below. He broke his leg, had been
thought sure of the Queen's gold medal for that
year, locked from ink and paper lost his chance.
The young Queen heard the story through his
cousin, a maid of honour, and sent him a gold
watch, with an inscription more precious than
Wyon's shop full of medals.

By the way, what becomes of old school and

MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES in

college medals ? One rarely meets with them in
after life. A greatly beloved London preacher sold
all his the other day that he might subsidise a
deserving institution ; and Macaulay did the same
through want of money for himself in early
struggling days. My own, gold and silver, repose
under a glass case, and perhaps those who survive
me may value them.

Calverley retained his saltatory power at Cam-
bridge. Professor Allbutt kindly writes to me
that one evening, in the presence of himself,
Walter Besant, and Wormald, then stroke of the
Christ's boat, he suddenly sprang like a skipjack
off the floor of the Christ's gatehouse porch, over
the bar which crossed (and still crosses) from
the wall to fasten one valve of the gate, alighting
safely in the triangular space within. The marvel
was not so much the height (37-^- inches) as the
rise without a run and clean descent into the
narrow triangular enclosure, free from collision
with door or wall : he must have jumped straight
upwards, clearing his feet easily, and then drop-
ping vertically downwards. He possessed enor-
mous thighs and large gluteal muscles, enabling
him to spring like a grass-hopper. The Professor
adds that Calverley was the most indolent man
of parts he ever knew; his reading casual and
intermittent, but his memory prodigious, with
power of absorbing from a book as though by
some ethereal process the matter demanded and
assimilable by his genius. His Cambridge life
has lately lost an honest chronicler in his great
friend Walter Wren, who boasted that he had

ii2 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

answered all the questions in the Calverley Pick-
wick Paper except the "red-faced Nixon."

More than once I have sat with Wren into the
small hours, listening to his reminiscences of his
friend's lampoons, epigrams, miracles of scholar-
ship and wit. Wren had often pressed him for a
scholarly tour de force ; caught him one wet morn-
ing in his room, and seized his chance. The
"Excursion" lay on a table; Calverley handed
it to his friend — " Read me any five-and-twenty
lines." Wren did so. "Again, more slowly."
Then for ten or fifteen minutes Calverley sat with
his head in his hands. " Now write " ; and he
dictated the translation in fluent Virgilian hexa-
meters. The remaining story I cite with special
pleasure as revealing a very noble aspect of his
many-faceted character. He heard from a pro-
fligate acquaintance of a country girl, turned out
of home by her parents for disobedience in some
love affair, come to seek service at Cambridge,
not yet ruined, but in a house where ruin was in-
evitable and imminent. He was reading for the
Craven, which he won ; to be seen by tutor or
proctor in questionable company or at a house
of ill-repute would mean rustication or expulsion ;
but he went to the place at once, extricated the
girl, took her with him to the station, paid her
fare, and sent her home with an earnestly written
letter to her father which brought about a recon-
ciliation, and saved her. Clever as Blaydes in
epigram and pun, though not in sustained satire,
was Arthur Ridding, of New College, elder brother
to the late Bishop of Southwell. When every one

MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 113

was celebrating in Latin verse the Duke of Well-
ington's funeral he was asked how to render
" lying in state." "Splendide mendax," was the
answer. At Winchester once during a cricket
match we passed on the "Tunbridge" towpath
a miserable horse, who with drooping head, glassy
eyes, protruding bones, was dragging a heavy
barge. "Tb-7rd0-o<s" (Tow-path- oss) was Ridding's
comment.

I must not leave the Forties without a re-
miniscence of the Henley race, the " Septem contra
Camum," in 1843. It was the event which really
popularised boating at Oxford ; the College races
were before that year a mere pleasant incident in a
summer term ; there were no College barges on
the river ; even the Oxford and Cambridge race,
except in 1829, the first race rowed, excited
languid interest. I stopped on Battersea bridge
one day in 1841 to watch the Oxford boat practising
against a Thames crew ; there was hardly any one
on the bank, where to-day thousands would be
running. It was, I think, in 1842 that a new oar,
Fletcher Menzies, of University, arose, under
whose training the Oxford style was changed and
pace improved, with prospect of beating Cam-
bridge, which had for several years been victor;
and the '43 race at Henley between the two picked
crews of Oxford University and the Cambridge
Subscription Rooms was anxiously expected as
a test. A few hours before the race Menzies, the
stroke, fell ill, and the " Rooms " refused to allow a
substitute. The contest seemed at an end, when
some one — Royds, of Brasenose, it was said —

H

1 14 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

proposed that the Oxford seven should pull against
the Cambridge eight. The audacious gallantry of
the idea took hold; George Hughes, of Oriel,
brother to Tom Hughes, was moved from seven to
stroke, and his place taken by the bow, Lowndes, of
Christchurch.1 So, with the bow-oar unmanned,
the race began, the crew hopeless of more than
a creditable defeat ; but as their boat held its own,
drew up, passed ahead, the excitement became
tremendous ; and when the Oxford flag fluttered
up, the men on the bank, as the guard said of his
leaders in " Nicholas Nickleby," went mad with
glory ; carried the rowers to the Red Lion, wildly
raced the street, like horses on the Corso in a
Roman carnival, tore up a heavy toll-bar gate, and
flung it over the bridge into the river. The boat
was moored as a trophy in Christchurch meadow at
the point where Pactolus poured its foul stream
into the Isis, and was shown for twenty-four years
to admiring freshmen ; until in 1867, rotten and de-
cayed, it was bought by jolly Tom Randall, mercer,
alderman, scholar, its sound parts fashioned into a
chair, and presented as the President's throne to
the University barge. One of the seven, John Cox,
of Trinity, who pulled six, died quite recently.

His elder brother, George Cox, of New College,
an extraordinarily promising man, died young. Be-
sides one or two coarse, clever, very popular songs,

1 I give the names of the seven in Appendix C. I be-
lieve that two of them, Royds and Bourne, are still alive.
R. B. Mansfield, author of the "Log of the Water-lily," a
brother Wykehamist, wrote to me that he was appointed locum
tenens for Royds, who was unable to come up till just before
the race.

MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 115

such as the " Oxford Freshman/' and " A Drop of
Good Beer/' he left behind him a satire of unusual
power, called " Black Gowns and Red Coats," pub-
lished in 1834. It is now very scarce, its author so
forgotten that Mr. Hirst in the Cassell " Life of
Gladstone," quotes him as George Fox. He draws
a lurid picture ; proclaims the teaching barren, the
teachers sunk in crapulence and sloth, the taught
licentious, extravagant, idle. Of tthe Dons only
three are excepted from his lash, the two Duncans
and Macbride ; of recent undergraduates only
one : —

" Yet on one form, whose ear can ne'er refuse
The Muse's tribute, for he loved the Muse,
Full many a fond expectant eye is bent,
Where Newark's towers are mirrored in the Trent.
Perchance ere long to shine in senates first,
His manhood echoing what his youth rehearsed,
Soon Gladstone's brows will bloom with greener bays,
Than twine the chaplet of a minstrel's lays,
Nor heed, while poring o'er each graver line,
The far faint music of a lute like mine."

There are passages of terrible force, as in the por-
trait of the profligate freshman ; memorable photo-
graphs of contemporary follies, as in the fast
exquisite's career ; echoes of conservative alarm at
the muttering thunder of reform ; momentary lapses
into prize poem jingle, redeemed by abundant
resonant epigram ; one special episode, " A Simple
Tale of Seduction," rising very nearly to the highest
strain of poetry. Was it a faithful portrait? No
more than was the " Oxford Spy," whose author,
Shergold Boone, lived to express his deep regret for
having written it in a curious penitential Univer-

n6 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

sity sermon. It generalised from a single and a
limited side of Oxford life, as it was said of Simeon
Stylites that he discerned the hog in Nature and
mistook Nature for the hog. Amongst the Heads
whom Cox indiscriminately chastises were Routh,
Gaisford, Cramer, Jenkyns, Ingram, Hawkins,
Hampden ; his "untutored Tutors" with their
bloated pedantry and screechowl throats numbered
in their ranks such men as Hussey, Newman, the
two Fabers, Robert Wilberf orce, Vowler Short, and
Hurrell Froude ; his one blameless junior was but
a notable comrade in the splendid youthful band
sampled, and sampled merely, in my last chapter.
We must bemoan the untimely loss of genius so
prodigal in its shortened promise ; but, remember-
ing his own admission that the fingers were not
always clean which held the pen, we discount the
Censor's satire with the banished Duke's reply to
sneering Jaques : —

" For thou thyself hast been a libertine ;
All the embossed sores and headed evils
That thou with license of free foot hast caught,
Wouldst thou disgorge into the general world."

My undergraduate reminiscences must stop short
with the early Fifties, at the line of cleavage between
the Old and New Oxford Comedy. They include
mad Harry Wilkins of Merton, manumitter of
Daubeny's apes, who once, an M.A. and Fellow
of his College, in broad daylight and full term, led
a mob of rowdy Christchurch undergraduates in a
duck hunt at the Long Bridges. He came up from
Harrow in 1840 with a Gregory Exhibition and
high scholarly repute, but with incipient deafness,

MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 117

which increased as years went on. I remember his
examination in the Schools, his inability to hear
questions, his cataclysmal answers when they
reached him. Probably his deafness was calcu-
lated ; Liddell, one of the examiners, remarked that
the way to make Mr. Wilkins hear was to question
him on subjects which he knew ; but there was no
doubt about his First Class. He was an eloquent
talker, used to sit kicking his legs on a table, pour-
ing out to a crowd of listeners classically poised
sentences like extracts from a review. His life's
occupation was writing school-books, by which he
made large sums ; his unrealised ambition was to
become a nobleman's chaplain, as the next best
thing to being a nobleman : " My dear fellow,
think what it would be to be a Marquis — a Marquis !
my dear fellow." He was a bon vivant, declined
into a fat Phaeacian, abrogated his Orders, and
latterly did nothing.

A very different man was Herbert Coleridge,
whose Double First in 1852 marked the close of
the old system, as Sir Robert Peel's in 1808 shed
lustre on its commencement. The most successful
Etonian of his day, Newcastle Scholar, and win-
ning the Balliol while still in the Sixth Form, he was
unappreciated in a school where athletic eminence
was the sole title to distinction ; at Oxford he found
and enjoyed a higher, more congenial level. His
richly endowed and beautiful mother, Sara Coleridge,
"last of the three, though eldest born" in Words-
worth's Triad, theologian, scholar, poetess, her
father's spiritual child in philosophy, learning, genius,
yet feminine in grace and sweetness, in domestic

n8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

tenderness and self-sacrifice, died just before his Class
was known. She had read with him, his Greek books
especially, throughout his school and college career.
He used to acknowledge, it was said, that, while he
beat her latterly in trained scholarship, she was
always his superior in vigour of phrasing and in
delicate verbal felicities. He was fond of talking
about "my famous grandfather," insomuch that
he gained the nickname of ov/c aTrainros. He never
took his degree : by an absurd rule then prevalent
— now, I am told, extinct — men taking the B.A.
with ^300 a year of their own, ranked as " Grand
Compounders," and, bedizened in scarlet gowns-
Cox's tulips they were called — paid ^100 in fees
to old Valentine Cox, the Esquire Bedel ; and this
Coleridge would not do. He turned his attention
to Philology, inducing the Philological Society to
announce a new English dictionary on a vast scale,
to be compiled with aid from volunteers through-
out the country, and edited by himself. I was one
of his humble coadjutors, and preserve many letters
which he wrote to me as the work went on. With
his death the enterprise fluttered broken-winged and
fell, to be revived in our own time by Dr. Murray.
He died in 1861, only thirty years old. Through-
out a prolonged and distressing illness he laboured
steadily and cheerfully ; beside him at his death lay
an unfinished review of Dasent's "Burnt Njal," which
had employed him almost to the last ; like another
heroic student, ]. R. Green, "he died learning."
Eighteen months before the end it was announced
to him that recovery was hopeless. "Then," said
he, " I must begin Sanskrit to-morrow."

MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 119

To close this chapter of retrospect, let me set
down the main differences which to an old man
surveying modern Oxford point the contrast be-
tween then and now. The first lies in the category
of dress, whose strict unwritten rules were in the
Thirties penally enforced and universally observed.
Men wore, not carried, their academicals in the
streets ; the Commoner's gown, now shrunk to an
ugly tippet, floated long and seemly, a sweet robe
of durance. Even to cricket and to the boats
black coats and beaver hats were worn, with
change and re-change upon the spot ; a blazer in
the High Street would have drawn a mob. A
frock or tail coat was correct in Hall ; in some
Colleges even a cut-away, as it was called, provok-
ing a sconce or fine. A clever group of under-
graduates in the Forties who presumed to dress
carelessly — Irving, son to the famous preacher;
Henry Kingsley, who ranked as one of the three
ugliest men in Oxford1 — and some three or four
besides, incurred universal obloquy, and were
known as the intellectual bargees. Nowadays the
garments of a gentleman are reserved, as high
school girls tell me that they keep their Long-
fellow, for Sundays ; while men pulling ladies on
the river go near to earn the epithet suggested by
Jonathan Oldbuck for his nephew Hector's Fenians,
through the frank emergence from amputated trou-
sers (Calverley's crurum non enarrabile tegmen) of

1 1 shall not give the names of the other two Calibans. One
having curly teeth, was known as Curius Dentatus ; the extra-
ordinary visage of the other was hit off by the inspired nick-
name, " The Exasperated Oyster."

120 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

what Clough's Bothie calls their lily-white thighs.
Even a more potent factor in University change is
the development of athleticism. At that time there
was no football and no " sports " ; only one cricket
field, the tl Magdalen ground/' at the Oxford end of
Cowley marsh. Comparatively few men boated ;
outriggers, dinghies, canoes, apolaustic punts were
unknown. Rich men hunted, followed the drag,
jumped horses over hurdles on Bullingdon Green,
drove tandem. This last was more common than
to-day : from West's, Tollitt's, Figg's, Seckham's
stables the leader was trotted out a mile or so to
await an innocent-looking gig, taken off again on
the return so as to outwit the Proctor. When
Osborne Gordon was Proproctor, he took his
chief in a fly one night to the edge of Bagley
Wood, told the driver to unfasten the horse and
push the fly into a ditch. The expected tandem
came — pulled up — "Can we help you?" said the
Jehu dismounting, when out stepped the velvet
sleeves with "Your name and College." The
plant was complete ; but Gordon had made the
Proctor promise amnesty, and the men were un-
molested.

These were amusements of the wealthy ; the
great mass of men, whose incomes yielded no
margin for equestrianism, took their exercise
in daily walks — the words " constitutional " and
" grind " not yet invented. At two o'clock, in pairs
or threes, the whole University poured forth for an
eight or ten miles' toe and heel on the Iffley, Head-
ington, Abingdon, Woodstock roads, returning to
five o'clock dinner. The restriction told undoubt-

MORE ABOUT UNDERGRADUATES 121

edly in favour of intellectual life. The thought
devoted now to matches and events and high
jumps and " bikes " moved then on loftier planes ;
in our walks, no less than in our rooms, then, not
as now,

" We glanced from theme to theme,

Discussed the books to love and hate,
Or touched the changes of the State,
Or threaded some Socratic dream.

There once we held debate, a band
Of youthful friends, on mind, and art,
And labour, and the changing mart,

And all the framework of the land."

Inly I fear in unathletic days was possible the
iffluent talk of a Tennyson and Hallam on the
Cam, on the I sis of a Whately and a Copleston, a
Newman and a Froude, a Congreve and Mark
Pattison, Stanley and Jowett, Clough and Matthew
Arnold — brain as against muscle, spirit as against
flesh, the man as against the animal, the higher as
against the lower life.

CHAPTER IX

SUMMA PAPAVERUM CAPITA—
CHRISTCHURCH

" See unfading in honours, immortal in years,
The great Mother of Churchmen and Tories appears"

— NEW OXFORD SAUSAGE.

" Presence-of-Mind " Smith — " Planting Peckwater " — Gaisford — His
Achievements as a Scholar — His brusquerie — Helen Douglas
— "Brigadier" Barnes — Dr. Jelf— Pusey — A Veiled Prophet —
His Mother, Lady Lucy Pusey — Pusey's Personal Characteristics
— His Brother the Agriculturist — Roots, Esculent and Hebrew —
A Religious Vivisector — How Pusey got his Hebrew Professorship
— My Relations with him — The Sacrificial Lamb — Attitude
towards Biblical Criticism and Free Thought — His Sermons —
Dicta — The Year 1855 — Other Chronicles of Christchurch —
Liddell— His Greatness— Max Muller— Ouseley— The Jelf Row—
The Thunny— Lewis Carroll— His Girl Play-fellows— Why his
Friendships with them Ended — A Personality Apart.

OF men, no less than plants, the upgrowth and
stature are unequal. The tallest ears in Thrasy-
bulus' cornfield, the proudest poppies in Tarquin's
garden, were, to use the metaphor of Prospero,
" trashed for overtopping " ; and so, inter silvas
Academi, some men stand out conspicuous to the
backward glance of memory above the haze which
shrouds the lower levels of the generations past,
claiming to be " taken off " in milder sense than by
the enigmatic cruelty of the Grecian or Etruscan
tyrant. Let me embalm in fragmentary guise some

CHRISTCHURCH 123

relics of the wit and wisdom of those once laurelled
now half-forgotten heroes.

In the august procession of Colleges Christchurch
leads the way. Its Dean at the opening of the
Thirties — /cal yap eri, Srjv TJV — was " Presence-of-
Mind" Smith. The tradition which explains the
name, and which has diverted many University
generations, may perhaps now be consigned to
oblivion. Smith's daughter Cecilia was engaged
(and afterwards married) to Richard Harington of
Brasenose. Harington was Proctor, and with the
young lady and her party attended a concert at the
Star. Behind them sat some Christchurch men,
who amused themselves by removing with a sharp
knife the " penwiper," of no utility and of uncertain
origin, worn by noblemen and proctors. What was
to be done with the trophy ? They hurried home,
pinned the penwiper to the Dean's door, and retired
into the obscurity of the adjacent archway. Tom
Gate opened, the carriage drove to the steps, the
party ascended to the door. A hand, stretched to
ring the bell, was arrested by the novel ornament ;
it was taken down and handed round. " Why, it is
Dick's penwiper," said Miss Cecilia's voice, as she
fingered the back-piece of her lover's toga ; and a
chorus of Samsonic laughter was heard retiring up
to Peckwater.

Peckwater enriched the Oxford vocabulary
with a proverb in the reign of Smith's successor,
Gaisford. During one of his periodical quarrels
with the men, some of them scaled his garden
wall in the night, dug up a quantity of shrubs,
and planted them in Peckwater, which was found

i24 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

next morning verdant with unwonted boskage ;
and for many years "planting Peckwater" was
synonymous with a Christchurch row. Gaisford
became Dean unexpectedly ; the men came up
in October, 1831, to find his grim person in Smith's
vacated stall. Smith appears to have been uneasy
at Oxford, while Gaisford longed to return to it
from Durham. So in some occult fashion Bishop
Van Mildert, whose niece was Gaisford's wife,
effected an exchange; Gaisford came to the
deanery, Smith subsided into one of the Silver
Canonries of Durham ; his portrait hangs in the
Castle. Gaisford was no divine ; he preached
annually in the cathedral on Christmas Day, and
a sentence from one of his sermons reverberated
into term-time.

" Nor can I do better, in conclusion, than impress upon you
the study of Greek literature, which not only elevates above
the vulgar herd, but leads not infrequently to positions of con-
siderable emolument."

The muse had taught him, as she taught Horace, malignum
spernere vulgas.

He was a rough and surly man ; had owed his
rise originally to Cyril Jackson, who discovered
the genius of the obscure freshman, gave him a
Christchurch studentship, and watched over him.
" You will never be a gentleman," said the " Great
Dean" to his protege with lordly candour, "but
you may succeed with certainty as a scholar.
Take some little known Greek author, and throw
your knowledge into editing it : that will found
your reputation." Gaisford selected the great
work on Greek metres of the Alexandrian gram-

CHRISTCHURCH 125

marian Hephaestion, annotated it with marvellous
erudition, and became at once a classical authority.
In 1811 Lord Liverpool, with a highly complimen-
tary letter, offered him the Professorship of Greek :
he replied : " My Lord, I have received your letter,
and accede to its contents. Yours, etc/' The
gaucherie came to Cyril Jackson's ears; he sent
for Gaisford, dictated a proper acknowledgment,
and made him send it to the Prime Minister with
a handsomely bound copy of his Hephaestion.
He never lectured ; but the higher Oxford scholar-
ship gained world-wide lustre from his produc-
tions. His Suidas and Etymologicon Magnum
are glorified in Scott's Homerics on the strife
between Wellington's and Peel's supporters for
the Chancellorship.

'AAA' oo-oi €is KatfeS/o^v irepl BooTropov ^ye/ocfl
8va) SoAi^ocr/cta TraAAoov
ofs Sa/xv^o
ov 8vo y

rAcuev drap[j,vKTOi(ri 7T/)ocrw7ra(rt

oi'ot vvv PporoL tier • 6 Se /uv /5ea TraAAe Kat otos.

In a facetious record of the Hebdomadal Board
Meeting in 1851 to protest against University
Reform, he is quoted as professing that he found
no relaxation so pleasant on a warm afternoon
as to lie on a sofa with a Suidas in one's arms.
These Lexica, with his Herodotus, won cordial
respect from German scholars, who had formed
their estimate of Oxford from third-rate perfor-
mances like Dr. Shaw's "Apollonius Rhodius."
His son used to relate how, going with his father
to call on Dindorf at Leipsic, the door was opened

126 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

by a shabby man whom they took to be the
famulus, but who on the announcement of Gais-
ford's name rushed into his arms and kissed him.
Poor Shaw's merits; on the other hand, they ap-
praised with contumely. The "Apollonius" was
re-edited, I think, by Bockh, whose volume was
eagerly scanned by Shaw in hopes of some com-
plimentary recognition. At last he found cited
one of his criticisms with the appended comment
" Putidissime Shavius" ! Gaisf ord was an unamiable
Head, lessjthan cordial to the Tutors, and speaking
roughly to his little boys. He nominated my old
schoolfellow, "Sam" Gardiner the historian, to a
studentship. Sam became an Irvingite, and thought
it right to inform the Dean, who at once sent for
the College books and erased Gardiner's name.
He had a liking for old Hancock, the porter at
Canterbury Gate, with whom he often paused to
joke, and whom he called the Archbishop of
Canterbury. Hancock once presumed so far as
to invite the Decanal party under that name to
tea : I do not think they condescended to immure
themselves in those unwholesome subterranean
rooms of his. The story of the Dean of Oriel's
compliments to the Dean of Christchurch is true
in part. The Dean Minor was Chase ; the Dean's
remark, not written but spoken to his neighbour,
was, "Oh! yes — Alexander the Coppersmith to
Alexander the Great." Equally confused is the
tradition of his daughter's suitor. It runs that
W. E. Jelf proposed to Miss Gaisford, who refused
him ; that Gaisford urged his deserts, as of a
scholar knowing more about 76 than any man in

CHRISTCHURCH 127

Oxford : — that the young lady answered ft it might
be so, but she herself knew too much about fiev
to accept him." Those who remember Gaisford will
doubt if his respect for Greek would overbear
his indignation that a mere Tutor should cast
eyes upon his daughter ; those who knew Osborne
Gordon will give a tolerable guess at the origin
of the story. A story indeed there was ; of love
strong as death, of brave and patient constancy,
of bright too brief fruition, not to be profaned
by mention here. Est et fideli tuta silentio merces.
I am growing tragic, and, as Wordsworth sings,
the moving accident is not my trade. Let me
end off old Gaisford's cenotaph with lines com-
posed, it was believed, by Henry Cotton, after-
wards Archdeacon of Cashel, who assumed certainly
in conceiving them the sock rather than the buskin,
when Gaisford, unloverlike, slovenly, black-a-vised,
wooed and won his first wife, the beautiful Helen
Douglas : —

" Here's to the maid who so graceful advances ;

JTis fair Helen Douglas, if right I divine.
Cupid, thou classical god of soft glances,
Teach me to ogle and make the nymph mine.

Look on a Tutor true,

Helen, for love of you,
Just metamorphosed from blacksmith to beau —

Hair combed and breeches new,

Love has changed Roderick Dhu,
While every gownsman cries, wondering, ' Oho ! '

In Greek, I believe, I must utter my passion,
For Greek's more familiar than English to me ;

And Byron of late has brought Greek into fashion,
There's some in his * Fair Maid of Athens' — let's see.

128 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

But this vile modern Greek
Never will do to speak ;

Let me try — ZUTJ /AOU <ras dyarru — ?

Pshaw ! I don't like the tone ;
Let me now try my own —
K\vdi (lev 'EX^i?, ffov yap fyw.

But here comes a handsome young spark whom I plucked once.

Perhaps he'll make love to her out of mere spite ;
Aye, touch thy cap and be proud of thy luck, dunce,
But Greek will go farther than grins, if I'm right.
By Dis the infernal god,
See, see — they smile — they nod —

Oh ! should my faithless flame
Love this young Malcolm Graeme,

"Ororoi TOTOTOI ev

Thank heaven ! there's one I don't see much about her,

Tis her townsman, the Tutor of Oriel, Fitz- James ;
For though of the two I am somewhat the stouter,
His legs are far neater, and older his claims.

Yet every Christchurch blade

Says I have won the maid ;
Every one, Dean and Don, swears it is so.

Honest Lloyd, blunt and bluff,

Levett and Goodenough,
All clap my back and cry ' Roderick's her beau.'

Come then, your influence propitious be shedding,

Ye Gnomes of Greek metres, since crowned are my hopes ;
Waltz in Trochaic time, waltz at my wedding,
Nymphs who preside over accent and tropes.
Scourge of false quantities,
Ghost of Hephaestion, rise !
Haply to this my success I may owe ;
Come sound the Doric string,
Let us in concert sing,
Joy to Hephaestion — Black Roderick, and Co."

CHRISTCHURCH 129

Gaisford's senior Canon was " Brigadier " Barnes,
a name persistent to the end of his long life be-
cause he had borne it in the Oxford Volunteer
Corps of 1803. To him was always attributed what
is I suppose the archetype of leading questions,
launched at a floundering youth in a Homer exa-
mination— " Who dragged whom how many times
round the walls of what ? " All the Canons, except
Pusey, were more or less nepotist in their nomina-
tion to Studentships ; but none of them came up
to Barnes. " I don't know what we're coming
to ! I've given studentships to my sons, and to
my nephews, and to my nephews' children, and
there are no more of my family left. I shall have
to give them by merit one of these days ! " I
knew him as a large, red-faced, kindly, very deaf
old gentleman, with three pleasant daughters, who
gave evening parties. To one of these came upon
a time Mrs. and the Miss Lloyds, widow and
daughters of Bagot's predecessor in the Oxford
See. The youngest girl had engaged herself to
Sanctuary, an undergraduate of Exeter. The
mother frowned on the attachment ; the sisters
favoured it. Sanctuary's rooms in Exeter com-
manded the Lloyd's dwelling, which was next door
to Kettel Hall ; and so it came to pass that when
mamma went out, a canary was hung outside the
drawing-room window, and the young gentleman
walked across.1 Old Barnes had imbibed from
his daughters some hazy notion of the liaison, and
greeted the pretty rebel, of whom he was very

1 " Je 1'ai vu," wrote old Canon Tristram on reading this.

I

130 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

fond, with a loud " How do you do, dear Miss ,

and how is Mr. Tabernacle ? "

Another Canon meriting record was Dr. Jelf.
He was also Principal of King's College, London,
and therein instrumental in expelling F. D. Maurice
from his Professorship, as a tribute to the majesty
of everlasting fire. He had been tutor of the blind
King of Hanover, whose full-length portrait in oils
adorned the drawing-room, and he had married
a Hanoverian, a highly accomplished Countess
Schlippenbach. Her presence, and that of two
young musical daughters, made his house exceed-
ingly attractive during his canonical residence. I
remember taking the tenor part with the young
ladies in Mendelssohn's Quartetts, while Thomson,
afterwards Archbishop, sang the bass. I recall too
a dinner party one day when I championed
Johnson's " Rambler " against general disparage-
ment, until from the head of the table Jelf in-
terposed, thanked me for what I had said, and
told us that at a critical period in his own life
he had owed very much to certain Papers in the
" Rambler."

Of Buckland and of Bull I have spoken ; there
remains Pusey. In those days he was a Veiled
Prophet, always a recluse, and after his wife's
death, in 1839, invisible except when preaching.
He increased as Newman decreased ; the name
"Puseyite" took the place of " Newmanite." As
mystagogue, as persecuted, as prophet, he appealed
to the romantic, the generous, the receptive natures ;
no sermons attracted undergraduates as did his. I
can see him passing to the pulpit through the

CHRISTCHURCH 131

crowds which overflowed the shabby, inconvenient,
unrestored cathedral, the pale, ascetic, furrowed
face, clouded and dusky always as with suggestions
of a blunt or half-used razor, the bowed grizzled
head, the drop into the pulpit out of sight until the
hymn was over, then the harsh, unmodulated voice,
the high-pitched devotional patristicism, the dog-
mas, obvious or novel, not so much ambassadorial
as from a man inhabiting his message ; now and
then the search-light thrown with startling vividness
on the secrets hidden in many a hearer's heart.
Some came once from mere curiosity and not
again, some felt repulsion, some went away alarmed,
impressed, transformed. It was in the beginning
of the Fifties that I first came to know him well,
sometimes in his brother's house at Pusey, some-
times in his own. His mother, too, I knew, Lady
Lucy Pusey, a dame of more than ninety years,
preserving the picturesque dress and sweet though
formal manners of Richardson's Cedar Parlour.
She remembered driving under Temple Bar with
her mother as a little girl, and being told to look up
and see the last "traitor's" head still mouldering on
its spike. She would tell me stories of her school,
where the girls sat daily in a horrible machine con-
structed to Procrusteanise a long and graceful neck
by drawing up the head and chin ; of her wedding
introduction to Queen Charlotte's drawing-room,
borne in her sedan chair by brown-coated
"Johnnies" and attended by running footmen with
silk coats and wax flambeaux; of the " reverend
gentleman '' from Oxford who rode over to Pusey
each Sunday morning in boots and cords, read

132 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

prayers in the little church, dined in the servants'
hall, and carried his ministrations and his boots to
two other parishes for the afternoon. She used
old-fashioned pronunciations, such as t'other,
'ooman, 'em for them. " Green tea poisonous ?
look at me. I'm an old 'ooman of ninety-two, and
I've drunk strong green tea all my life ! " She loved
to talk of Ed'ard, as she called her famous son, re-
lating how, when he gained his First Class and his
father begged him to claim some valuable comme-
morative present, he asked for a complete set of the
Fathers ; and how in the Long Vacation he used to
carry his folios to a shady corner in the garden
which she pointed out, and sit there reading with a
tub of cold water close at hand, into which he
plunged his curly head whenever study made it
ache. She died, I think, in 1858 ; her sedan chair,
in which she regularly went to church on Sunday
from her house in Grosvenor Square, and which
attracted always a little crowd of onlookers, was
one of the last used in England.

Two things impressed me when I first saw
Dr. Pusey close : his exceeding slovenliness of
person ; buttonless boots, necktie limp, intonsum
mentum> unbrushed coat collar, grey hair "all-to-
ruffled " ; and the almost artificial sweetness of his
smile, contrasting as it did with the sombre gloom
of his face when in repose. He lived the life of a
godly eremite : reading no newspapers, he was
unacquainted with the commonest names and
occurrences ; and was looked upon with alarm
in the Berkshire neighbourhood, where an old lady,
much respected as "a deadly one for prophecy,"

PUSEY

From a pen-and-ink drawing of the Thirties
Photographed from the Print by Mrs. Frieda Girdlestone

CHRISTCHURCH 133

had identified him with one of the three frogs which
were to come out of the dragon's mouth. His
brother, the renowned agriculturist, would intro-
duce him to visitors with the aphorism that one of
them dealt in esculent, the other in Hebrew roots ;
but, like his friend and follower Charles Marriott, he
had no small talk, and would sit absolutely silent in
strange company. Into external society he never
went; was once persuaded by his old friend and
neighbour Sir Robert Throgmorton to meet at
dinner the Roman Catholic antiquary and theo-
logian Dr. Rock ; but he came back bewailing that
Dr. Rock had opened controversy so soon as they
sat down, had kept it up after the ladies had left the
table, had walked homewards with him in order to
pursue it, flinging a last word after his opponent
as they parted at Mr. Pusey's lodge-gate. In
contrast to his disinclination for general talk was
his morbid love of groping in the spiritual interiors
of those with whom he found himself alone. He
would ask of strangers questions which but for his
sweet and courteous manner they must have deemed
impertinent. I had not been in his company a
week before he had extracted my past history, habit
of mind, future aims. Persons who evaded his
questionings fell in his opinion ; he denounced
as reprobate a sullen groom who drove him in
and out of Oxford, and who had repelled his
attempts at inquisition : the habit of acting towards
others as a confessor seemed to have generated
a scientific pleasure in religious vivisection. He
had countless clients of this kind ; women chiefly,
but young men, too, as readers of Mark Pattison's

134 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

" Memoirs " will recollect. Flys came to the door,
from which descended ladies, Una-like in wimple
and black stole, "as one that inly mourned,"
obtained their interview, and went away. He paid
frequent visits for the same purpose to Miss Sellon's
institution — Chretien's wicked witticism will recur
to some who read1 — and on our occasional visits
to Wantage, where Butler reigned as vicar, with
Liddon and Mackonochie as his curates, we were
detained till late at night while he gave audience to
ladies of the place. Sisterhoods were his especial
delight and admiration ; he had begun to work
for their establishment in 1840, somewhat against
Newman's judgment; his eager support of them
being rooted less in the benefit they might confer
on the community than as a means of securing
their votaries in the virginity which he had come to
look upon as the highest state of life. He made
an idol of celibacy, exerting all his influence on
one occasion and setting many springs in motion to
enlist in the Clewer Home a young orphan lady
whose friends deemed her not old enough for such
a life, and treating his ultimate discomfiture as
a victory of Evil over Good. His obscurantist
dread of worldly influences begot the feeling that no
young woman was safe except in a nunnery, no
young man except in Orders. He would urge men
to be ordained at the earliest possible period :
controversial knowledge, systematic reading, theo-
logical erudition, might come afterwards ; if only

1 There was a foolish report of his contemplated marriage to
Miss Sellon : Chretien of Oriel remarked that the offspring of
the alliance would be known as the " Pusey Miscellany?

CHRISTCHURCH

135

the youth were pious, earnest, docile, the great
thing was to fix, to secure, to capture him.

In learning Pusey stood probably supreme
amongst English divines of his century : the other
leaders of the movement — even Keble, much more
Newman — were by comparison half-educated men.
They knew no German — he was an adept ; they
were not Orientalists — he had toiled over five years
for sixteen hours a day at Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldee,
under the Semitic scholar Freytag. His vast
patristic knowledge is shown in his exhaustive
catenae, and in the " Library of the Fathers "
which he conceived and conducted. He was
familiar with the entire range of Protestant Refor-
mation literature, with the English Deists of the
seventeenth century, with the German Rationalists
of the nineteenth. His appreciation of language
as the vital genius of cultured human thought was
not so much an acquirement as spontaneous ;
corresponding felicities of diction in one or another
tongue seemed to present themselves to him in-
stinctively and without effort : Keble, his examiner
in the Schools, used to say that Pusey's construe
of Pindar revealed to him for the first time a
perfect English equivalent of the magnificent
dithyrambic roll which he had believed to be
untransferable.

Pusey's religious development was gradual.
Brought up in lax traditional English Church-
manship, he was early attracted by, and always
loved, the Evangelicals, sharing their deep rever-
ence for the written Word, and their dislike of
what he called " Orthodoxism," the " godless ortho-

136 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

doxy " of Mark Pattison's essay — an exaltation,
that is, of form and phrase above the realities
they were constructed to convey. He was initiated
into controversy through a brilliant schoolfellow
and friend, Julian Hibbert, who, a sceptic even
while at Eton, became later a pugnacious atheist.
Pusey determined to face and fight out the diffi-
culties which Hibbert's arguments had raised, and,
after taking his degree at Oxford, betook himself
to the German Universities, where, more vigorously
than elsewhere in Europe, Rationalism at that time
flourished. He often spoke in after years of the
kindness shown to him by the professors at Got-
tingen and Berlin ; they listened to his arguments,
maintained or sometimes modified their own.
Their influence on his mind appeared in his first
published work, a defence of German teaching
against a powerful attack made upon it by Hugh
James Rose. Later he came to think that he had
judged his friends too leniently, felt alarm at the
tendency of their destructive criticism, and with-
drew his book from circulation.

In one of our walks he told me of his appoint-
ment to the Hebrew Professorship. He had been a
favourite with Lloyd, who held besides his Oxford
bishopric the post of Divinity Professor, and who
when at Cuddesdon or in London gave up his
Christchurch house and library to his young friend's
use. Pusey owned a Hebrew Bible with large folio
interleavings, and these were filled with the notes of
ten years' study. Once the Bishop came suddenly
to his house, and Pusey, vacating it in a hurry, left
his folio behind. It caught Lloyd's eye : he examined

CHRISTCHURCH 13?

it, and gave it back without remark ; but when soon
afterwards Dr. Nicol died and Sir Robert Peel
consulted Lloyd as to the appointment, he strongly
recommended Pusey, who became Regius Pro-
fessor at the age of twenty-nine. Lloyd cautioned
him — " Remember, you must be circumspect, you
will be <j)9ovepwv (frdovepcbraros." Lord Radnor, the
head of the family, was just then in vehement
Opposition, and the Duke of Wellington's colleagues
attacked him for patronising a Bouverie. " How
could I help it," said the Duke, "when they told
me he was the best man ? " He was a laborious
Professor, but a dull lecturer. His lectures, given
in his library, were conversational, not continuous
or methodised; his manner hesitating, iterative,
involved ; you had to look out for and painfully
disentangle the valuable learning they contained.
Rarely his subject would inspire him. Once at the
close of a wearisome disquisition on Isaiah xxi. he
suddenly woke up at the words, lt Watchman, what
of the night ? " gave a swift, brilliant, exhaustive
paraphrase of those two oracular verses, sent us
away electrified and wondering. Two other
incidents from the lecture room rise up before me.
He was laying down the probable site of ancient
Tyre, when an eccentric student broke in to quote
from memory Grote's dictum on the subject, dif-
fering altogether from the Doctor's. He looked
scared for a moment at the interruption, then
smilingly reserved the point, and told us next time
that he had read Grote's note and acceded to his
view. Another day I noticed that he was un-
wontedly distrait, casting glances towards the same

138 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

student, who, always nervous and restless, was
crumpling in his fingers a scrap of written paper.
When the room cleared and I remained to chat, as
I sometimes did, he joyously pounced upon the
paper, which had fallen under a chair, and showed
it to me crammed with manuscript in his own
minute handwriting, representing as he told me
two days' labour, which would have been lost to
him had young Fidgety destroyed it.

He early gave me a proof of his regard, vouch-
safed I was told only to a few, in setting me to work
for him : successive pages from Greek and Latin
which I translated look me now in the face when I
open his " Catena on the Eucharist." But he would
let no one else overwork me, for I had much on my
hands at the time ; and when he heard poor Edward
Herbert, then an Eton boy, murdered afterwards
by Greek brigands, petition me to read Virgil with
him in the evenings, interposed an eager negative —
" Mr. Tuckwell's evening is the poor man's one
ewe lamb, and I will not have it sacrificed." Twice
he spoke to me of his wife, whom he had loved at
eighteen, married at twenty-eight, lost at thirty-nine.
A common friend was sacrificing an important
sphere of work in order to seek with his delicate
wife a warmer climate, and I asked him — no
doubt a priggish query — if the abandonment were
justifiable on the highest grounds. "Justifiable ? "
he said, " I would have given up anything and

gone anywhere, but " ; his voice shook, the

aposiopesis remained unfilled. Once afterwards I
was with him in his drawing-room at Oxford. It
had been newly papered when the family from

:HRISTCHURCH 139

Pusey came to live with him. He told me that the
former paper had been chosen by his wife, and
that to cover it up had pained him, but pointed
with a sad smile to a corner where the fresh paper
had been rubbed away (by his own fingers I
suspected) and an inch or two of the old pattern
disclosed. He was greatly amused by a report,
which I repeated to him as current in Oxford, that
he punished his children for their misdeeds by
holding their fingers in the candle as an antepast
of hell-fire. He said he had never punished his
children in his life, and his son Philip, to whom
the tradition was repeated, added that the nearest
approach to punishment he could recollect was
when his father, looking over his shoulder as he
read a novel on a Sunday, pulled his ear and said,
" Oh, Phil, you heathen ! " The well-known
anecdote of the lamb he corrected for me. He
was in the three-horse omnibus which used to run
from Oxford to the railway at Steventon, and a
garrulous lady talked to him of the Newmanites
and of Dr. Pusey, adding that the latter, she was
credibly informed, sacrificed a lamb every Friday.
"I thought I ought to tell her,'; he said; "so I
answered, ' My dear madam, I am Dr. Pusey, and
I do not know how to kill a lamb.' "

In argument he was always modest and candid.
Mr. Algernon Herbert, the eccentric, the omniscient,
the adorable, was referring Christ's miracles to
personal magnetism and medica fides ; to no innate
thaumaturgic power that is, but to a passionate
belief on the part of the recipients which acted on
their bodily frames. Pusey frankly accepted the

1 40 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

theory as regarded the healing of functional maladies,
citing modern instances in support of it, but point-
ing out that the explanation failed to cover the
removal of organic disease ; that when, for instance,
a man born blind was reported to have gained
eyesight, you must accept the miracle or deny the
fact. He owned that a six days' Creation could
not be literally maintained, for he had attended
Buckland's lectures ; and he renounced on Rol-
leston's remonstrance his belief in a simultaneous
universal deluge. When Darwin's book came out,
he asked Rolleston whether the species existing
upon the globe five thousand years ago might not
have been so few as to be contained in an Ark of
the dimensions given in Genesis. " I would not
answer him," said Rolleston in his blunt way ; " I
knew he would quote me as an authority." I
pressed him once to say whether, in his opinion,
morality without faith or faith without morality
were the more hopeful state. He did not like my
way of putting it, and fenced with the question for
a time, giving the preference at last to faith without
morality, but owning his verdict to be paradoxical,
and laughing heartily when I reminded him of the
sound Churchman in Boswell's " Johnson,"1 who
never entered church, but never passed the door
without pulling off his hat. I quoted a recent
Charge by Bishop Blomfield containing strong

1 "Boswell," vol. ii. p. 195 ; ed. 1835. "Campbell is a good
man, a pious man ; I am afraid he has not been in the inside
of a church for many years, but he never passes a church
without pulling off his hat. This shows that he has good
principles."

CHRISTCHURCH 141

doctrinal statements. He said that he had not
read and should not read it : " He has been a
Bishop twenty years, has given, they say, eight
hours a day to the merely mechanical work of his
diocese ; what time has he had to read, or what is
his opinion worth on questions of theology or
doctrine ? " The ritualistic practices just begin-
ning to appear he regarded with distaste, as pre-
sumptuous and mistaken ; his strong disapproba-
tion of their later developments is recorded in a
recent "Life of Goulburn." We called upon an
adjacent rector, who showed us proudly as a
virtutis opus his newly made reredos surmounted
by a large cross, admitting that in consequence
of its erection several parishioners had ceased to
attend the service. Pusey said to me as we drove
away, " I would never put up a cross in any
church, feeling certain that it would offend some
one." Alluding once to his own alleged hetero-
doxy, he challenged us to find any rule of the
Church which he had ever broken. Rubric in
hand, we catechised him, but he stood the test,
owning indeed that he always stayed away from
the Gunpowder Plot Service, but refusing to re-
cognise a Royal Warrant as canonical.

He had no familiar acquaintance with our older
English classics ; a quotation from Cowley, Dryden,
Pope, seemed to touch in him a latent string, but
awoke no literary association ; for Dr. Johnson
indeed he professed loyal admiration — less, I fancy,
for the author of " Rasselas," the " Rambler," and
the " Lives," than for the scrupulous High Church-
man who drank his tea without milk and ate his

1 42 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

buns without currants upon Good Friday. Of
modern publications not theological he read ab-
solutely nothing ; one of his nieces pressed on him
for a railway journey Miss Yonge's " Heartsease,"
just then in vogue, but he could not get through
the opening chapter ; his sympathies, all wide as
they were, failed to vibrate to the poor child-bride's
sorrows. He was a staunch defender of absent
friends ; when a visitor spoke disparagingly once
of Dr. J. M. Neale, another time of Dean Lake, he
flared up on their behalf with an energy for which
he afterwards apologised. For freethinkers he had
the deepest repugnance ; his outbreak when I
quoted admiringly Fronde's fine paper on the
Study of History in the ll Oxford Essays " rever-
berated through the family. He seemed to feel
something like alarm in the presence of neologian
writers, English or German, as of antagonists
whose arrows threatened weak points in his
armour. He recounted to me the curiosity
first, the later uneasiness, with which, while in
Germany, he listened to the Professors' lectures.
I told him how Shuttleworth, when at Holland
House as tutor and engaged in controversy with
Allen, "Lady Holland's infidel," demolished his
attacks on prophecy by citation of Isaiah liii. "The
Germans," he said with a groan, " would have
shown Allen how to meet it." The close of his
life was darkened by this cloud. Newman found
that Rome, failing him on many points, could at
least shelter him from Rationalism. To Pusey it
was a Brocken spectre, dilating in proportion as
he approached it. Sir Henry Acland has told for

CHRISTCHURCH 143

us the dismay with which he looked upon its ad-
vance ; has recorded, too, the adapted line from
Horace,

" Nil desperandum, Christo duce et auspice Christo,"

which, amid all his anxieties, summarised his abiding
solace.

He preached every Sunday at Pusey in the little
church, a tonic change from the ordinary occupant
of the pulpit, whose homilies Mr. Pusey pronounced
to be Blair infused with Epictetus. His sermons
there gave the same overwhelming impression of
personal saintliness as breathed from them in the
Christchurch pulpit ; but the language was labo-
riously simple, arresting the crass Berkshire rustics
by pithy epigrams which fastened on their minds,
and which some of them used afterwards to repeat
to me : " Find out your strong point and make the
most of it " ; " Seek heaven because it is God's
throne, not because it is an escape from hell " ;
" Holiness consists not in doing uncommon things,
but in doing common things in an uncommon
way." Of his obiter dicta I recall the following :
" In the study of theology books are better than
topics." " The best ecclesiastical history is
Fleury's." " It is a good thing to know a large
number of minds." "A carefully written sermon
or essay cannot be recast or expanded ; its in-
tegrity is marred by reconstruction." " Discon-
tinue fasting as dangerous if you feel exhausted
on the following day." (His own regular Friday
meal was a poached egg on spinach, with one glass
of port.) " Bennett, of St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, is

i44 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

the only man I know who went abroad with waver-
ing Anglican allegiance and returned an English
Churchman." " Hooker's chapter on the Eucharist
is disappointing ; he shirks the logical sequence
of his grand argument on the Incarnation and
passes off into mere pious rhapsody." " Luther
had an irreverent mind; he says that if God had
pleased to make a bit of stick the Sacrament
He might have done so." I failed to see the
irreverence, but he spoke the words whisperingly
and with a shudder, and I could not question
him further.

The year 1855, with which these experiences end,
marked a transitional period in his life-history. In
the autumn of the previous year, greatly to his
surprise, he was elected at the head of the Profes-
soriate a member of the enlarged Hebdomadal
Council under the new Act, was fascinated at their
first encounter, as he told me, by the dashing talk
and practical energy of his colleague, Jeune, be-
came, I think, for a time a weapon in that clever
tactician's hands, at any rate came out of his Achilles
tent and flung himself with a keen sense of free-
dom and enjoyment into active legislation for the
liberated University. Mark Pattison used to say
that no man of superior intellect and character
could be yoked unequally to the machine of public
"business" without moral and mental deteriora-
tion; and certainly the Pusey of later years, as
useful for aught I know, was not so great as the
imposing hierophant of the Forties. He is handled
saucily in the clever fragment which sprang from
young Balliol about 1856 : —

CHRISTCHURCH 145

" Now, stilled the various labours of the day,
Student and Don the drowsy charm obey.
E'en Pusey owns the soft approach of sleep,
Long as his sermons, as his learning deep ;
Peaceful he rests from Hebraistic lore,
And finds that calm he gave so oft before." *

The lines are quite good-humoured, but no longer
reverential ; they could not have been written ten
years earlier. I had known him as a devout
Casaubon, unconscious of contemporary triviali-
ties, aloof in patristic reverie and in spiritual
pathology. That at any rate he ceased to be;
these earlier reminiscences, nowhere hitherto re-
corded, indicate the close of a chapter in his inner
as in his outer life.

But the chronicles of Christchurch are not all in
canon type. In my bookcase is a finely bound
Delphin Virgil, a school prize with the legend
Honoris Causa on its cover, which belonged to
Charles Atterbury, Senior Student, and Vicar of
St. Mary Magdalen. A well-bred gentleman, a
finished scholar, a devoutly efficient pastor, he
was also an enthusiastic whip, never so happy
as when handling Costar's thoroughbreds. He
was destined, like Pope's Cobham, to feel his
ruling passion strong in death : while driving the
Birmingham coach he was upset and killed. The
text of his sermon on the Sunday before had been
" Set thine house in order ; for thou shalt die, and
not live."

In the Thirties Liddell strode the quadrangles,
already magnificent in presence, less superbly

1 Appendix I.

K.

146 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Olympian than he afterwards became ; I think
Westminster saw the meridian of his personal
beauty. Sweeping into the Abbey with his boys
on a Sunday afternoon, he belittled and uglified
all the surpliced dignitaries around him ; venerable
to the last, he yet made one rejoice that the gods
do not grow old. " None knew/' wrote to me at
his death one of his most distinguished colleagues —

"None knew how great Liddell was. I rather hope they
will not have his Life written. Only those who worked with
him could tell what a depth of tenderness and generosity
there was in him. He was strangled by the Don, and spent
his great powers on the Dictionary. Do the greatest of men
achieve more than one-tenth of their powers?"

The Life has been written, and we may be grateful
for it. It has set him right with a half-appreciating
world ; has taught those who needed to be informed
that beneath the stern, reserved, austere outside lay a
man humble, reverent, tender-hearted ; his severity
straight-forwardness, his hauteur shyness, his re-
ticence born of the strong self-restraint which
guarded all utterances by exactest truth, his Stoi-
cism like that of the Roman Aurelius, like that
of the Hebrew Preacher — " death so dark, and
all dies ; love it before it dies ; love it because
it dies ; fear God, love one another, this is the
whole of man." The cathedral which he beauti-
fied, the University which he helped to reform,
the College whose intellectual and moral strain
he raised, will not behold a nobler man.

Of Christchurch, too, his friend of many years,
Max Miiller, was an adopted son. I recall the
black-haired slight young foreigner in 1847, or

CHRISTCHURCH 147

thereabouts, known first as a pianist in Oxford
drawing-rooms, whose inmates ceased their chatter
at his brilliant touch. I remember the contest for
the Sanskrit Professorship, wherein I voted, and
as far as I could worked for him ; an inferior
candidate being preferred before him, first because
Max was a " Germaniser," secondly because a friend
of Bunsen must of necessity be heretical, thirdly
because it was unpatriotic to confer an English
Chair on any but an Englishman. The horror of
everything German was of very ancient date. Old
Tatham of Lincoln, in his famous two-and-a-half-
hour sermon on the Three Heavenly Witnesses,
wished "all the Jarman critics at the bottom of
the Jarman Ocean." The sermon ended thus :
"The further elucidation of this subject I leave
to those learned Doctors and dignitaries whom I
see before me ; who, receiving large emoluments for
doing little, are content with doing less. And now,
&c." I attended his stimulating philological lectures ;
learning from his lips the then novel doctrine of the
Aryan migrations and the rationale of Greek myths :
the charm of his delivery heightened by a few Ger-
manisms of pronunciation and terminology ; moost
for "must," dixonary for "vocabulary." He con-
sulted me later about two matters in which, strange
to say, I was better informed than he, the art of
budding roses and the conduct of marine aquaria.
He watched me one day in my garden putting in
some buds, and tried his hand ; but gave it up
presently, saying : " While you are budding a
dozen standards I can earn .£5 by writing an
article." I was his guest sometimes in his pretty

148 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

home opposite the Magdalen elms, where played
Deichmann —

" Whose bowing seemed made
For a hand with a jewel,"

where Jenny Lind warbled, Charles Kingsley
stammered in impassioned tete-d-tete. I read with
delight some years ago his "Auld Lang Syne,"
pasting into it an 1860 portrait of his then clear-
cut face, as a corrective to the more commonplace
outlines of the elderly presentment, which, hardly
suiting the title, decorates the frontispiece of his
book.

As I think of him in his earlier musical Oxford
days, there comes before me a more wonderful
pianist, who had taken his degree, but was still
resident at Christchurch, when Max Miiller first
appeared. Few now remember Sir Frederick
Ouseley's playing at the amateur concerts in the
earlier Forties ; the slight form and dark foreign face,
the prolonged rubbing and twisting of the mobile
hands before they were placed upon the instru-
ment ; the large, prominent, opal eyes, in fine frenzy
rolling over the audience as the piece went on, the
executant brilliancy of the marvellous performance,
with constructive development and contrapuntal
skill which the highest English adepts professed
themselves unable to emulate. Like Handel, Men-
delssohn, Mozart, he was born a musical prodigy ;
but he lacked serious training ; the early golden
years were wasted by his relatives in petting, not
instructing, him ; Greek and Latin, which he hated,
were forced upon him ; a clerical career and

SIR FREDERICK OUSELEY

From a Photograph taken about 1856

CHRISTCHURCH 149

ritualistic excitements distracted him. Even so, he
was nothing short of a very great musician. He
was probably — there is wealth of competent con-
sensus in the verdict — one of the greatest extem-
pore players who ever lived. Often, in days of
yore, have I stood amongst a group round his
piano challenging him to improvise. He always
asked for a subject. Some man would supply a
theme, perhaps intentionally intricate. In a few
moments he would begin, and the piece would
grow under his hand with a wealth of resource, a
command of technical device, a fertility of ima-
gination, and a skilful elaboration of complicated
texture,

" Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony — "

which raised it to the rank of a great classical
masterpiece. His knowledge of the history of
music was unique ; his library, finely equipped in
other departments of literature, inherited from his
father, contained not only endless autograph and
unpublished scores, but several hundred works on
music in many languages, all of which, an accom-
plished linguist, he had read and mastered. His
musical degree and his acceptance of the Professor-
ship were looked upon by the Dons as ignomini-
ous condescensions; though old Gaisford loyally
attended the performance in the Theatre of his
Mus.Doc. exercise, the oratorio of " Polycarp," in
which his friend Madame Dolby sang the sweet
contralto solos. As Professor he raised to a very
high pitch the standard of graduate qualification, and
delivered erudite lectures, of which only meagre

150 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

reports remain. From his many compositions a
couple of anthems and two or three hymns alone
seem likely to survive ; his ultimate repute will,
I fear, be altogether incommensurate with his vast
powers.

Apart from exceptional men like these, intel-
lectually as historically, Christchurch held its own.
The Common Room in the Thirties contained
seniors such as Foster Lloyd, F.R.S., and Political
Economy Professor ; Robert Hussey, a monument
of erudition, not yet grimly saturnine as he became
in later years ; Jacob Ley, the greatly beloved, who
probably, like Dominie Sampson, " evinced! even
from his cradle an uncommon seriousness of dis-
position." Of the juniors were Bode, Hertford
Scholar, author of the hymn "O Jesus, I have
promised " ; W. E. Jelf ; Osborne Gordon, Ireland
Scholar and Double First; Linwood, Hertford,
Ireland, Craven Scholar, and, a little later, Kitchin,
Double First, now Dean of Durham. Linwood
was nephew to the once celebrated Miss Linwood,
whose needlework imitation of great paintings drew
crowds to her Exhibition Rooms in Leicester
Square. He is known to the present generation as
compiler of the " Anthologia Oxoniensis." He was
a rough, shabby fellow when I remember him,
living in London, and coming up to examine in the
Schools, where he used to scandalise his colleagues
by proposing that for the adjudication of Classes
they should " throw into the fire all that other
rubbish, and go by the Greek Prose." It was said
of him that somewhat late in life, reading St. Paul's
Epistles for the first time, and asked by Gaisford

CHRISTCHURCH 15!

what he thought of them, he answered "that
they contained a good deal of carious matter,
but the Greek was execrable."

By Jelf hangs a tale. He was younger brother to
the Canon, an accomplished scholar, author of a
Greek Grammar which furnished to English students
what Matthias had achieved for Germans. But his
reputation rests upon the historic "Jelf row" of
1843. Proctor in that year, he was the most
unpopular official of the century, beating " Lincoln
Green" and Merton Peters, who ranked next to
him in odium. He seems to have found enjoyment
in what Proctors usually hate, the punitive side
of his duty. Dexterous in capturing, offensive
in reprimanding, venomous in chastising his victims,
he had accumulated against himself a fund of
hatred which abode its time, until it might find
relief in the Saturnalia of Commemoration. It
happened that the uproar which ensued gave voice
to a duplex querela ; hostilities were rampant in
the area as well as in the gallery of the Theatre.
The young lions of the Newmania, sore from
Pusey's suspension and Isaac Williams' defeat, and
led by Lewis of Jesus and Jack Morris of Exeter,
chose to be furious at the presentation of a
Unitarian, the American Minister Everett, for
an honorary D.C.L. Early in the morning they
called on the Vice-Chancellor, Wynter, President
of St. John's, to protest. Wynter, serene, indif-
ferent, handsome — " St. John's Head on a charger "
men called him as he went out for his daily ride —
urged that Mr. Everett conformed in England ;
that honorary degrees had no reference to theo-

152 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

logical opinion ; would not, in short, withdraw the
distinguished heretic. So finding remonstrance
vain, the angry malcontents attended in formidable
numbers to non placet the degree. On the other
hand, the smarting undergraduates had sworn a
solemn oath, like John Barleycorn's royal foes,
to stop all proceedings until Jelf was driven out
of the Theatre. From his first appearance in the
procession the yells and groans went on without a
moment's slackening. In dumb show the Vice-
Chancellor opened the Convocation, Garbett de-
claimed inaudible his Creweian Oration, Bliss
presented Everett, who, red-gowned, unconscious,
smiling, took his seat among the Doctors. An
opposing Latin speech by Marriott and a volley
of non placets from his friends were imagined
but unheard amid the din, and ignored by Wynter,
who at the expiration of an hour dissolved the
Convocation, to the fury of the Puseyites, the
triumph of the gallery, and, so all believed, to
his own concealed but genuine relief from a very
difficult position. After-protests poured in upon
him, to be met by bland assurances, which no
one credited, but no one could disprove, that in the
ceaseless uproar he had not heard the non placets ;
that, in short, factum valuit, the thing was done.
His well-known hostility to the High Churchmen
added poignancy to their defeat : when soon after-
wards he was succeeded as Vice-Chancellor by Ben
Symons, one of them said " Solvitur acris Hyems
Grata Vice" Three or four men were expelled ;
amongst them Parnell, a Double First of Wynter's
own College, who had not yet put on his gown, and

CHRISTCHURCH 153

who, according to the testimony of those who sat
near him, was inconspicuous if not innocent in
the turmoil ; while the posthumous indignation
of the M.A.'s fizzled out in the appointment of
a committee. "So," says the Introduction to a
recent edition of " Eothen," " while Everett was
obnoxious to the Puseyites, Jelf was obnoxious
to the undergraduates ; the cannonade of the
angry youngsters drowned the odium of the
theological malcontents ;

" Another lion gave another roar,
And the first lion thought the last a bore."

The Tractarian element in the tumult is described
in a richly humorous letter to Lord Blachford 1 from
Dean Church, himself prominent in the following
year as interposing with Guillemard of Trinity to
crush by their proctorial non placet the decree against
"Tract 90": a dramatic incident which had not
occurred during the entire century, except when
in 1836 the measure to suspend Hampden was
veto'd by Bayley of Pembroke and Reynolds of
Jesus. I possess the address of thanks presented
to Church and Guillemard, signed by about six
hundred notable graduates, not by any means
confined to the High Church party.

The memory of Osborne Gordon is, I fear,
already fading. The authors of the "Life of
Stanley " think that " some few readers may have
met with his Greek lines on Chantrey's children."
I should hope every scholar can repeat them —
non obtusa adeo gestamus pectoral2 Less known,

1 " Life of Dean Church," p. 40. 2 Appendix J.

154 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

and very scarce, are his " Sapphics on the Installa-
tion of Lord Derby as Chancellor," a parody on
Horace's " Quern Virum." x With solemn irony
he glorifies his hero ; lauds him, in fiction such
as Phoebus loves, a consistent Proteus, skilled to
veil base thoughts in noble words ; recalls in a
felicitous stanza his savage assault on smiling
Bishop Wilberforce in the House of Lords ; sneers
at the tail of followers brought with him to be
decorated — " sorry wreck of a defeated crew, to
be refitted in the harbour of quiet Isis." Young
men and maidens in the Theatre cheer him and
them ; with malign smile the country looks and
listens. I know not what fly had stung him —
what motive winged and pointed a shaft so keen ;
it must have pierced the Chancellor's embroidered
panoply, vulnerable to elegant academic taunts,
though impervious to vernacular Parliamentary
vituperation.

One more skit let me be permitted to recall,
emanating from the same College, partly from
the same pen. In 1857 Dr. Acland went with
Dean Liddell, then in delicate health, to Madeira.
On his return voyage a large thunny was caught
by the sailors, rescued when the ship was wrecked
on the Dorsetshire coast, taken to Oxford by the
Professor, articulated by Charles Robertson, and
mounted in the Anatomy School. Brought thence
to the new Museum in 1860, it was placed in the
area, with a somewhat inflated Latin inscription
on Thunnus quern vides affixed to its handsome
case. Soon appeared a sham Congregation notice,
1 Appendix K.

CHRISTCHURCH 155

announcing a statute for the abrogation of the
label and substituting another, Thunnus quem rides,
a line-upon-line travesty of the first; as derisively
satirical as its model was affectedly complacent.1
It was believed to have been rough-hewn by Lewis
Carroll^ handed round the Common Room, re-
touched by Gordon, Bode, and Chaffers, who
happened to be dining as Gordon's guest : a
delightful change at the close, eo-KeXereufl?;, skele-
tonised, to e^KLS/jLcopevdrj, Skidmoreised, Skidmore
having constructed the supporting iron foliage of
the area, was ascribed to Mr. Prout, who is still
in green old age an admired ornament of "The
House." Would that we had more of Osborne
Gordon ! Marshall of Christchurch edited a
volume of his sermons with an inadequate
Memoir. Those who can still remember that
queer, mocking face with its half-closed, in-
scrutable eyes (he was known as " the debauched
crow"), and who knew the humour, wisdom, be-
nignity, which lay behind it, are fewer every
day —

" Slowly we disarray ; our leaves grow few,
Few on the tree, and many on the sod."

He is a memory only, and will some day cease
to be that.

A recent diarist in a book of " Memoirs " calls
his old tutor a vulgarian and a tuft-hunter. Pro-
bably Gordon snubbed him, deservedly no doubt,
but forgetting Shallow's advice to Davy, and this
is his revenge; the valet-de-chambre was no hero.

1 Appendix L.

156 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

He was accused of obsequiousness to " Tufts."
Polite to them he was, and they were fond of him.
When one of them was sent down in disgrace, he
passed Gordon as he left by Canterbury Gate.
" Sorry to leave you, Mr. Gordon/' he said ; " I
always enjoyed attending your lectures." "Did
you really ? " was the answer, " I must say that you
showed a great deal of self-denial." A conceited
undergraduate said to him one day : " I am afraid,
sir, that I have rather a contempt for Plato." " And

/ am afraid, Mr. , that your contempt has not

been bred by familiarity."

I have mentioned Lewis Carroll. He was junior
to these other men, and has been fully biogra-
phised since his death. Of course, he was one of
the sights of Oxford : strangers, lady strangers
especially, begged their lionising friends to point
out Mr. Dodgson, and were disappointed when
they saw the homely figure and the grave, repellent
face. Except to little girls, he was not an alluring
personage. Austere, shy, precise, absorbed in
mathematical reverie, watchfully tenacious of his
dignity, stiffly conservative in political, theological,
social theory, his life mapped out in squares like
Alice's landscape, he struck discords in the frank
harmonious College camaraderie. Away from
Oxford, and especially in home life, I am told that
he was cheery and would unbend himself. The
irreconcilable dualism of his exceptional nature,
incongruous blend of extravagant frolic with self-
conscious puritan repression, is interesting as a
psychological study now that he is gone, but cut
him off while living from all except the " little

CHRISTCHURCH 157

misses" who were his chosen associates. His
passion for them was universal and undiscrimi-
nating ; like Miss Snevellici's papa, he loved them
every one. Yet even here he was symmetrical
and rigid ; reaching the point where brook and
river meet, the petted loving child friend was
dropped, abruptly, remorselessly, finally. Perhaps
it was just as well : probably the severance was
mutual ; the little maids put away childish things,
he did not : to their maturer interests and grown-
up day-dreams he could have made no response :
better to cherish the recollection unimpaired than
to blur it by later consciousness of unsuitability ;
to think of him as they think of nursery books ;
a pleasant memory, laid by upon their shelves
affectionately, although no longer read. And to
the few who loved him this faithlessness, as some
have called it, seems to reveal the secret of his
character. He was what German Novalis has
called a "grown-up child." A man in intellectual
range, severe self-knowledge, venturesome imagina-
tion, he remained a child in frankness, innocence,
simplicity; his pedantry cloaking a responsiveness
which shrank from coarser, more conventional,
adult contact, yet vibrated to the spiritual kinship
of little ones, still radiant with the visionary
light which most of us lose all too soon, but
which shone on him through life.

CHAPTER X

MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE

" Lordly is Christchurch, with its walks and qiiadrangles ;
lovely is Merton, as it were the sister of Christchurch, and
gracefully dependent ; New College is majestic ; All Souls
worthy of princes y but Magdalen alone is all that is the
charm of others, compendious in itself ; yielding only a
little to each rival in particular, but in the whole excelling
them all." — CLEVELAND COXE.

The Most Beautiful of Colleges— Dr. Routh— His Old Young Wife—
His Mania for Books — His Friends — Some Famous Men of
Magdalen — New College — Shuttleworth — Whately and Manning
— The Abingdon Ball and the Brigands of Bagley Wood —
Public Orator Crowe — Christopher Erie — His Sharp Tongue —
Lancelot Lee— One of the Detenus of 1803 — Dr. Nares— His
Drollery written for Miss Horseman — Warden Sewell.

THE "College of the Lily" pairs naturally with its
Mater Pulchra, New College. I knew Magdalen in
the Thirties ; the rambling Greyhound Inn, with
large glass-warehouse adjoining, on the site of the
present schoolroom ; the trees, tall and umbrageous
then as they are not to-day ; the choristers' play-
ground, in front of which used to pace up and
down the Usher, Lancaster of Queen's, who once
enlivened a University sermon by speaking of
Hampden as "that atrocious Professor." I recall
the noble Inigo Jones gateway, removed early in
the Forties in deference to the Puginesque craze
which had just then set in ; Pugin's erection in its

turn, prope funeratus arboris ictu, damaged by the

158

DR. ROUTH, PRESIDENT OF MAGDALEN
From the Pickersgill Portrait, 1851 (?)

MAC

r~ii ,

MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 159

fall of a vast elm branch, and looked upon as
somewhat paltry by a succeeding generation, giving
way after several experiments to the present un-
satisfying entrance.

Architecturally, Magdalen is to other Colleges
what Oxford is to other towns and cities. Even
at New College we miss the indescribable charm of
its Hall and Chapel ; in its walks and grove we
have, as nowhere else, the "hallowed haunt" of
Milton and the " classic ground " of Addison. No
other College pretends to match the felicitous
grouping of its clustered buildings ; and its cam-
panile dominating the whole is supreme among the
third-pointed towers of all England. Nowhere else
does the Numen inest so inspire and enthral. But
its prime of rarity in those days was its President,
Dr. Routh, "of olden worth the lonely leaf and
last" ; who, born in 1754, was in the later Thirties
past fourscore, and was to live into his hundredth
year. It was as a spectacle that he excited popular
interest; to see him shuffle into Chapel from his
lodgings a Sunday crowd assembled. The wig,
with trencher cap insecurely poised above it, the
long cassock, ample gown, shorts and buckled
shoes ; the bent form, pale venerable face, enor-
mous pendent eyebrows, generic to antique por-
traits in Bodleian gallery or College Halls, were
here to be seen alive —

" Some statue you would swear
Stepped from its pedestal to take the air."

After 1836 he was rarely visible in the streets, but
presided at College Examinations, and dined in

160 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Hall on Gaudy days, occupying the large State
Chair, never profaned by meaner loins, constructed
from the immemorial Magdalen elm, which, much
older than the College, fell with a terrific crash in
1789. In front of his lodgings stood a scarcely
less venerable acacia tree, split from the root ori-
ginally, and divagating in three mighty stems, of
late years carefully propped. Once while he was
at Tylehurst, his country home, word was sent to
him Ithat a heavy gale had blown his acacia tree
down : he returned a peremptory message that it
should be put up again. Put up it was ; the Mag-
dalen Dryads owned their chief ; it lived, and long
survived him. I stood for a Demyship early in the
Forties ; nominated, according to the custom then
prevalent, by Frank Faber. He was confined to
his rooms by illness, and had failed to comply with
some essential preliminary, of which he ought to
have been informed. But — so it was said — the Vice-
President, with the Fellow next in order, to whom
Faber's nomination, if forfeited, would lapse, con-
spired to keep it from the invalid ; and when he
was carried into Hall to vote for me, they sprang
the objection they had husbanded, and disqualified
him. I went in for viva voce immediately after-
wards, and I remember how old Routh, shaken by
the contest, wept while I construed to him the lines
from the Third Book of the " Iliad," in which
Helen, from the walls of Troy, names the Grecian
chiefs below. My supplanter was a Winchester boy
named Wickham, who died shortly afterwards.

Mrs. Routh was as noticeable as her husband.
She was born in the year of his election to the

MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 161

Presidency, 1791; so that between "her dear man,"

as she called him, and herself — "that crathy old

woman," as he occasionally called her — were nearly

forty years. We are told that she three times asked

him to marry her before he consented ; and some

of his love verses are preserved, resembling, George

Eliot would say, the cawings of an amorous rook.

But she had become rapidly and prematurely old :

with strongly marked features, a large moustache,

and a profusion of grey hair, she paraded the streets,

a spectral figure, in a little chaise drawn by a

donkey and attended by a hunchbacked lad named

Cox. "Woman," her husband used to proclaim,

when from the luncheon table he saw Cox leading

the donkey carriage round, "Woman, the ass is at

the door." Meeting me as a boy, she sometimes

used to take me in to lunch, where the old President,

who was intimate with my father, talked to me

good-naturedly, questioned me about my school

work ; showed me one day the scar on his table

which had been left by Dr. Parr's tobacco ; and

enjoyed my admiration of the books which lined

hall, rooms, staircase. He was proud of possessing

many not on the Bodleian shelves. To himself

and to Dr. Bandinel the London catalogues were

regularly sent : Bandinel would mark off the

treasures which he coveted and write by return of

post, but was constantly informed that the books

had gone to Dr. Routh. One day, calling at Tegg's

shop, he saw the boy bring in a pile of catalogues

wet from the press. Now is my time, he thought ;

noted some sets of rare books, and said, " I will

take these books away with me." The shopman

L

1 62 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

went to consult his chief. " I am very sorry, sir,
but they are all bespoken by Dr. Routh." " How
can that be ? Are not the catalogues freshly
printed ? " " Yes, sir, but proofs of all our cata-
logues are sent to Dr. Routh." Dr. Jacobson was
another disappointed rival ; he obtained the proofs,
but was still too late : remonstrating with the book-
seller, he was told that while he wrote for the books
he wanted, the President sent a man up by the
early coach to secure and bring them back. The
story gives delightful point to the generous caution
which he is said to have impressed on Jacobson :
" Beware, sir, of acquiring the habit of reading
catalogues ; you will never get any good from it,
and it will consume much of your time."

Old Marshall Hacker, going through the papers
of his uncle, W. A. Jenner, found a bundle of slips
on which Jenner, a Fellow of Magdalen, had for
years, after leaving Common Room in the evening,
written down stories told, noteworthy observations
and jokes, many of them from Routh's lips. Some
were coarse ; and Marshall Hacker, without making
any selection, burned the whole. Herostratus still
walks amongst us.

His especial friend was Dr. Bliss ; I have a
letter to him from Routh, sealed with his favourite
IX&T2 seal, deploring my father's death. Bliss
once asked him to say, supposing our language*
to become dead to-morrow, who would take the
classic rank in English which Cicero had held in
Latin. (t I think, sir, our friend Tom Warton,"
he replied ; an answer bespeaking no great know-
ledge of older English Prose, In later years

MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 163

Burgon, fussy, obsequious, adulating, hovered
about him. Henry Coxe, an accomplished mimic,
used to render dialogues between the two, bringing
out, as in the tl always verify quotations," and the
recipe for theological study, the absurdity of which
Burgon's narrative is all unconscious. He much
admired ]. H. Newman, who dedicated to him his
" Lectures on Romanism in 1837 " ; speaking of him
always as " that clever young gentleman of Oriel."
Having come to Oxford from his Suffolk home in
1770, he was a mine of anecdote as to the remote past;
had seen two undergraduates hanged for highway
robbery on the gallows which ornamented the
corner of Long Wall near Holywell Church — the
"church by the gallows" it is called in a skit
from Anthony Wood's collection — remembered
stopping in High Street to gaze on Dr. Johnson
as he rolled up the steps into University College.
One of his aunts, he used to say, had known a
lady who saw Charles I. in Oxford. He died,
so John Rigaud averred, and so Blagrave, his
>rother-in-law and man of] business admitted,
through chagrin at the fall of Russian Securities,
in which most of his hoards were invested, at the
time of the Crimean War — a very respectable
way of breaking one's heart, according to Mr.
Dombey, but which would have formed an anti-
climax to Burgon's rhapsodies. Rigaud imitated his
voice and manner with startling accuracy ; his stories
of the old man owed their force to this, and would
be pointless written down. Rigaud preserved too
his queer shoes and gown, and one of his wigs;
another was secured by Daubeny, who sent it to

164 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

be petrified in the Knaresborough Spring. It
would have been indestructible without this cal-
cifying process : when in 1860 a grave was sunk
in New College antechapel to receive the remains
of Warden Williams, an ancient skeleton was
found extended, the bones partly dissolved, the
wig fresh as from the maker's hands. The old
man's spectacles passed from Bloxam to Rigaud,
and are now preserved by Dr. Macray of the
Bodleian.

Of the Magdalen Fellows in the Thirties I have
mentioned Daubeny ; I recall also Chambers, riding
from Swerford into Oxford in a broad-brimmed
hat, followed by a pack of little dogs ; and Sibthorp,
whose oscillation to and fro between the English
and the Roman Church were viewed as comic
rather than serious at a time when " 'verts " had
not begun to come upon the stage. I recall Frank
Faber, a kindly careless valetudinarian, lecturing
in dressing-gown and slippers, his head sheltered
by an umbrella from every gleam of sunshine.
An old Fellow of the College used to relate that,
riding once out of Oxford, and resting at Shilling-
ford Inn, he was told that Mr. Faber was in the
house. He went to his room, and found him
sitting up in bed with an umbrella over his head.
James Mozley's shy, cold outside hid a genial
nature and a mind of rarest power. "Dick"
Sewell was a frank Bohemian ; his vigorous New-
digate on the "Temple of Vesta" was said to
have been written in a single night. A barrister
on the Western circuit, he used to get me leave
out at Winchester, sending me to dine alone at

MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 165

his lodgings, where I found a roast fowl, a pint
of champagne, a novel, and a tip. Henderson's
First Class in 1839 was long memorable in the
history of the Schools ; he became Headmaster
successively of Hatfield Hall, Durham ; of Vic-
toria College, Jersey ; and of Leeds Grammar
School. He died, as Dean of Carlisle, in 1905.
Charles Reade, just beginning to write novels,
would beguile acquaintances into his ill-furnished
rooms, and read to them ad nauseam from his
latest MS. Bloxam, Newman's curate at Little-
more, incarnation of all that was ideal in the
College, its mediaevalism, sentiment, piety, was the
first man to appear in Oxford wearing the long
collarless coat, white stock, high waistcoat, which
form nowadays the inartistic clerical uniform.
Like his better known brother Matthew, he was
a laborious antiquary, and compiled a Register
of the Members of his College from its founda-
tion. He established the delightful Christmas Eve
entertainment in the College Hall which has been
annual now for fifty-eight years. Held first in his
own rooms as a treat to the choristers, then in the
Summer Common Room, it came in 1849 to fill
the Hall with a hundred guests or more. Hymns,
carols, parts of the " Messiah," were sung through
the evening ; the boys were feasted at the high
table, the visitors waiting upon them, and eating
Christmas frumenty. Then, when midnight drew
near, a hush fell on the assembly, the choir
gathered round the piano ; twelve o'clock pealed
from the tower, and as the last stroke ceased to
vibrate, Pergolesi's "Gloria" rose like a stream

1 66 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

of rich distilled perfumes, and sent us home in
tune for the worship as well as for the festivity
of the Christmas Day. I am told that the gracious
custom still abides, to keep fresh and green the
memory of dear old Bloxam. Of the remaining
Fellows I will say no more than that they were,
for the most part, fruges consumere nati} born to eat
their founder's venison and drink his wine ; and
justified their birthright zealously. Two among
them, Whorwood and T. H. Newman, claim a
kindly though certainly not a reverential notice.
Whorwood was the last and landless descendant
of an ancient line, which had owned for centuries
the wide manors of Shotover and Headington.
His mother, "Madame Whorwood," a stately old
lady in antique dress, lived with him in the house
overhanging the Cherwell on the north side of
Magdalen Bridge ; the top of her high cap usually
visible to passers-by. They moved afterwards to
a house in the High Street, over which her an-
cestral hatchment was suspended when she died.
He was a fresh-coloured, smooth-faced, vivacious,
whist-playing, amiable lounger. Later in life he
took the College living of Willoughby, leading
there a lonely, melancholy life, cheated and ruled
by five domestics, whose service was perfect free-
dom. Dining once in his old College, he was
boasting of their docility and devotion ; Rigaud
scribbled and handed round his own rendering
of the facts —

" Sunt mihi quinque domi servi, sunt quinque magistri ;
Quod jubeo faciunt, quodque volunt jubeo ; "

MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 167

Englished promptly by Octavius Ogle into—

" Five servants I have whom I handsomely pay,
Five masters I have whom I always obey.
To do what I bid them they never refuse,
For I bid them do nothing but just what they choose."

Alas ! The human butterfly in its later stages
is a sight more cautionary than pleasing ; I met
poor Whorwood not long before his death, pallid,
weary, corpulent ; and he cried as we talked over
old times. Newman was a practical joker ; his
rooms overlooked the river, and he sometimes
fished out of his window. The men coming in
from Cowley Marsh cricket and constitutionals
were arrested one afternoon to see him struggling
with a fish, which Sawell announced through a
speaking trumpet from another window to be an
enormous pike. Great was the concourse, pas-
sionate the excitement, profuse the advice ; till at
last the monster was hauled up, gaffed, and drawn
in at the window. It was on view in his rooms
ever after, ingeniously constructed of cardboard
overlaid with tinfoil. He was not related to the
future Cardinal ; but his initials, T. H. N., caused
him often to be confounded with, and to receive
letters intended for, his Oriel namesake, J. H. N. ;
and their handwriting was curiously alike. An
accomplished artist and connoisseur, he once, by
borrowing the Cardinal's signature, gained access
to Claude's Liber Veritatis at Chatsworth — of
course in the absence of the Duke, who would
have detected him. On an earlier occasion, having
undertaken to preach in the country, he secured
by the false initials an immense congregation ; and

1 68 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

delivered, as he used to tell the story, a sermon
on the " Final Conflagration of all things/' which
terrified some into fits. Opening one day a letter
mis-sent to himself, he found it to be from a pious
spinster, asking for a subscription, and requesting
an autograph copy of some of J. H. N.'s beautiful
verses, to be inserted in her album. He sent the
following : —

"My name's T. H. Newman j

And sorely grieved I am
That, like an orphaned lamb,
I haven't got a dam."

From Magdalen I pass naturally to New College,
whence it lineally sprang. Its Warden was Shuttle-
worth, close friend and ally of the " Noetics," the
only Head who in 1834 had courage to vote for
the admission of Dissenters to the University ;
author of a rather dull book on St. Paul's Epistles,
but a wit, raconteur, caricaturist, mimic. When
the queer cupola, extant and inexplicable still,
was made to surmount the Theatre, he wrote to
Whately — " You ask for news : I have one item
only : the Radcliffe has kittened, and they have
perched one of the kittens on the top of the
Sheldonian." He invented an inclined mahogany
railroad, still in use, whereby decanters circula-
ting at the horse-shoe tables in the Common Room
could be carried automatically across the interval
of the fire-place. A Winchester boy, he made his
mark at school as a writer of burlesques ; two of
his pieces, " Phaethon," and the " Progress of
Learning," sent up in 1800 instead of, or together
with, the serious poems expected, are preserved

MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 169

in the "Carmina Wiccamica." * Here are four
lines from the first, where the steeds discover
that Phaethon, not Phoebus, sits behind them —

" For Horses, Poets all agree,
Have common sense as well as we ;
Nay, Homer tells us they can speak
Not only common sense, but Greek."

The second opens with the boy leaving home —

" The fatal morn arrives, and oh !
To school the blubbering youth must go,"

carries him through school, college, country living,
to a Deanery ; ends with the predictive lines —

" As erst to him, O heavenly Maid,
Learning, to me impart thy aid ;

0 teach my feet like his to stray
Along Preferment's flowery way.
And, if thy hallowed shrine before

1 still thy ready aid implore,

Make me, O Sphere-descended Queen,
A Bishop, or, at least, a Dean."

Episcopal aspirations do not always take shape at
eighteen years old ; with Shuttleworth they seem
to have been continuous ; Scott's Homerics satirise
him thirty-four years later, as refraining from the
Peel and Wellington contest, in order to maintain
his expectation of a bishopric from the Whigs —

'A.vdpCjv 5' OVK TjyeiTO Trepi'/cXuros '
(TT7J 5' airavevdev ewv,

A mitre he obtained in 1840, and died sixteen
months after his elevation. On going down to his
bishopric at Chichester, he was warned by Whately
against Manning, an incumbent in his diocese,
1 Appendix M.

170 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

as an undoubted "Tractite" — so Whately always
called them. The Archdeaconry of Chichester
was vacant, the appointment in the new Bishop's
hands. He met Manning at a dinner-party, was
impressed with his mien and talk, and they sat
together afterwards in the drawing-room mutually
charmed. Manning had walked from no great
distance ; his parsonage lay in the Bishop's way
home, and Shuttleworth offered him a seat in his
carriage. Set down at his own door, " Good-
night, my lord," said Manning ; « Good-night,
Mr. Archdeacon," said the Bishop.

His Fellows at New College, as at Magdalen,
were curiously unequal in merit and distinction. A
very few, "the two good Duncans," Bandinel, Tre-
menheere, Chief Justice Erie, Archdeacon Grant,
George Cox, J. E. Sewell, afterwards Warden,
William Heathcote, be of them that have left a
name behind them ; the rest were mostly of very
common clay indeed. Until 1838 the College had
refused to undergo the public examination for
degrees, and was further oppressed by the incubus
of founder's kin, which imposed two superannuated
dunces from Winchester every year, to the exclu-
sion often of their meritorious seniors. Two cen-
turies earlier the discrediting aphorism, "Golden
scholars, silver bachelors, leaden masters," had been
popularly applied to the College ; and in 1852 it had
fallen so low that the undergraduates petitioned for
out-college tutors, pleading the incompetence of the
resident staff. A wild set were not only the juniors
but the seniors far into the Thirties. More than
one strange scandal I could recount, of a sort

MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 171

which, like Horace's gold, are best placed when
unexhumed. But I can vouch for the following
frolic. Some men were going to the Abingdon
Ball ; and in the Common Room the conversation
turned on a highway robbery recently perpetrated
near Wheatley. The ball-goers talked valiantly of
their own courage, contemptuously of brigand
dangers; their fly was announced, and off they
drove. Coming home they were stopped in a dark
part of Bagley Wood by two masked men, one of
whom held the horses' heads, while his mate pointed
a pistol into the fly with the conventional highway-
man's demand. Meekly our gallant travellers sur-
rendered money, watches, jewellery. One pleaded
for a ring which had belonged to his old mother ;
the deceased lady was consigned to Tartarus, the
ring was taken, and the marauders rode away. Great
commiseration was shown to the victims when
they told their tale, great activity displayed by the
police ; until, on going into Hall the next afternoon,
they saw lying in a heap on the centre of the
high table the abstracted valuables, including the
maternal ring, while mounting guard over them
was a broken candlestick which had done duty as
a pistol. The two practical jokers had ridden to
the wood, tied their horses to the trees, waited for
the revellers, and played the wild Prince and Poins.
A few more men of note I remember, rari nantes
in gurgite. Public Orator Crowe had lately passed
away, farmer-like, uncouth, wearing a long cassock
to hide his leather breeches, but a fine Latinist with
a magniloquent delivery which found scope each
year at the Encaenia. The neat Latin inscription

172 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

on Warden Gauntlett's monument in the antechapel
was his ; I possess the first draft in his handwriting,
endorsed by Routh, to whom he had submitted it.
He was known to the outer world by his really fine
poem, " Lewesdon Hill " ; I remember " Mad "
Hoskins, the squire of North Perrott, an enthusiastic
Wykehamist, repeating the whole of it as we rode
together, in 1846, within sight of that " proud
rising." His father was a humble carpenter at
Winchester ; the son, grown eminent, was standing
by the west door of the Cathedral in conversation
with the Dean and Warden, when the father, in
working dress, his rule projecting from his cor-
duroys, came by, and walked aside from the group
in modest avoidance of recognition. Crowe saw
him, and called after him in Hampshire Doric,
" Here, fayther, if thee baint ashamed of I, I baint
ashamed of thee."

Another eccentric of the Thirties, Christopher
Erie, brother to the Chief Justice, lived till long
afterwards. Like most old-fashioned scholars of
an era when philology was not, he knew his Greek
and Latin books by heart, pouring out apt quota-
tions with the broad a which then marked
Wykehamists ; was a proficient, too, in Italian,
French, and English literature, with his Dante at
his fingers' ends. He was a familiar figure at the
Athenaeum, where one day his Bishop, newly
appointed Sam of Oxford, remonstrated with him —
very impertinently, since they were on neutral
ground — for wearing a black neckcloth. Erie
called the club porter. " Porter, do you know
this gentleman ? This is the Bishop of Oxford.

MAG

MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 173

Get me half-a-dozen white ties, and bring me one
whenever this gentleman comes into the club."
His living was in the part of Buckinghamshire
colonised by Rothschilds — Jerusalem the Golden it
was called — and the reigning Baron was his squire.
It was Erie's whim to dress carelessly; and the
plutocrat; walking one day with a large party and
meeting his Rector in the parish, had the bad taste
to handle his sleeve and say, " Rather a shabby
coat, parson, isn't it?" Erie held it up to him —
"Will you buysh ? will you buysh ? " There
ensued an exitus Israel, and Erie walked on chuck-
ling and victorious.

Of the same standing, and not less an original,
was Lancelot Lee, who, with imposing face and
figure, strident voice, assumed ferocity of manner,
was a frequent visitor at my father's. He was one
of the Detenus, Englishmen seized by Napoleon
in 1803, and incarcerated till his fall in iSi^..1
They were about ten thousand in number, some
previously residents in France, but chiefly visitors
or tourists. They included noblemen and gentle-
men, clergymen and academics with their servants,
workmen, and commercial travellers. All were
at first treated as prisoners of war; but this
sentence was afterwards limited to English officers,
the rest were made prisoners on parole, and lodged
in certain fortified towns. Those of higher rank,
Lee amongst them, were confined at Verdun, under
the charge of a ruffianly General Wirion, who
treated them with insolent barbarity. A committee
of nine gentlemen was formed to represent the
1 Page 24.

174 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

prisoners and assist the poorer captives, and of
this committee Lee was one. Liberated at the
peace, he returned to New College, and was
presented to the valuable living of Wootton,
near Woodstock, where he built an exceedingly
handsome parsonage, and ruled his people as a
kindly despot, his memory lingering among them
affectionately long after his death. Coming out
of church one day, he found two disreputable
vagabonds in the churchyard. " What are you
doing here ? " " Oh, sir, we are seeking the
Lord." " Seeking the Lord, are you ? Do you
see those stocks ? That is where the Lord will
find you, if you stay here another minute." They
did not stay. Insulted in his old age by a hulking
ruffian, the terror of the village, he gave him a
tremendous box on the ear ; and the bully, who
could easily have thrashed him, slunk off cowed.
The degree examination at New College was a
farce, and roused his never-failing indignation.
Traditions still survive of his furious protests, and
Warden Gauntlett's placid insensibility, at each
repetition of the sham. It would seem, however,
that he was moved by moral disgust rather than
by intellectual ardour. Old William Risley, of
Deddington, used to relate that he was sitting in
Lee's rooms one day when an undergraduate came
in with a puzzling equation and a request for
help. "Turn over to the next page, sir." "I have
done so, sir." "Then turn over to the next" —
adding aside to Risley as the discomfited inquirer

shut the door, tl I hate your d d clever fellows."

He went once with Henry Williams, most cere-

MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 175

monious and correct of men, to call on Miss
Horseman, the delightful old vestal earlier men-
tioned. She was out. "Who shall I say called,
sir ? " " Tell her," in a voice which sounded from
the High to Canterbury gate, "Tell her it was
the man she ought to have married ! " He died
a bachelor in 1841.

Miss Horseman's name suggests another well-
known figure of the Thirties, old Dr. Nares,
Professor of Modern History. As a handsome
young Fellow of Merton, long before, he had
acted in private theatricals at Blenheim, and eloped
with Lady Charlotte Spencer Churchill. He was
believed to be the author of an amusing book,
" Thinks I to Myself," which lay on Miss Horse-
man's table, but it was also attributed to his
grandfather, the Rev. Henry Coles. The old lady
and the Professor were fast friends, and she used
to repeat to me a piece of clever jargon which
he once extemporised to test the power of some
bragging memorist. The closing sentence dove-
tails into Foote's similar improvisation of the
Piccalillies and the Great Panjandrum,1 the con-
fusion probably due to her ; 'the earlier part was,
I believe, quite new. I learned it from the old
lady's lips, and have retained it unwritten all
these years in the receptacle which held Count
Smorltork's materials for his great work on
England : —

" There was a shovel, and a shackfok, and a one-eyed pikestaff,
went to rob a rich poor man of the head of a herring, the brains
of a sprat, and a bushel of barley meal. So he got up in

1 Appendix N.

1 76 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

the morning. 'Wife, we're robbed/ says he. 'You lie,' says
she. ' Tis true,' says he ; ' we must saddle the brown hen and
bridle the black staff.' So off they rode till they came to a
long wide short narrow lane, and there they met three horse-
nails bleeding at both nostrils. So they sent for the Hickmaid
of the Hall ; she, being a rare stinter of blood, sent them word
that Mrs. Jones Tittymouse Tattymouse was brought to bed of
a mustard spoon and was very ill, and so she couldn't come.
So they sent the boy to Mr. Macklin's, at the corner of St.
Martin's Lane, for some plums to make an apple pudding with,
but desired they mightn't be wrapped in brown paper, since the
last tasted so of cabbage leaves they couldn't eat them. So
the baker's boy came in to buy a penny loaf ; there being none,
they gave him a farthing candle to eat. Presently three bears
came by, and one popped its head in, and said, ' What, bless
me, no soap ! ' So the head fell off the block, and beat the
powder out of the Lord Chancellor's wig ; and he died, and she
married the barber ; and that's the way that Mrs. Atkins came
to lose her apple dumpling."

Ex humili potens might be the motto of New
College to-day ; its last fifty-seven years exhibit
a resurrection as surprising from as profound a
depth as is figured in the second part of " Faust."
In 1850 the College, with its magnificent equip-
ment, large revenues, scholarly Warden, and
distinguished past, had become a hive of drones ;
its residents few, its mode of life luxurious and
expensive, its teaching bald and scanty. Now, in
numbers and repute, in the Schools and on the river,
New College ranks among the very highest Colleges.
Transformation began with the Parliamentary
Commission of 1854. It struck off antiquated
chains, abolished the too close connection with
Winchester, and the mischievous anachronism of
founder's kin, increased the number and emoluments
of the scholars. The younger men, growing each

MAGDALEN AND NEW COLLEGE 177

year in numbers and importance, and imbued with
liberal ideas, carried successive reforms in spite of
obstruction from their mediaeval seniors. The
Warden, Sewell, elected in 1860 on the death of
Dr. Williams, was conservative by instinct and by
habit, with the maxim u qnieta non movere" ever
on his lips. His distaste for the reform was patent,
but his respect for the reformers who engineered
it was unbounded ; reconciled to the measures
by the men, he brought 'caution and sagacity to
their assistance. He had his reward, not only in
their respect and gratitude, but in the happiness
which his new position ministered to a very
unusual temperament. " Business," a term incar-
nated more often than defined, was the breath of
his nostrils : to write and answer letters in his
beautiful copperplate hand, to sort and docket
papers, chronicle collegiate ephemera, draw up
reports, supervise and check accounts — all that men
are wont to find tedious and remit to secretaries
—formed his being's end and aim. If life-tasks
such as these are not heroic in themselves, yet,
discharged faithfully and well, they make possible
the pageantry of life for others : and the destiny
which selected him, an unambitious man, to rule
an ambitious College, exalted his peculiar gifts,
though abstractedly commonplace and ordinary,
to become essential factors in a great creation.

And if his life was happy, so also his death
was enviable. In expecting his approaching re-
tirement, we all dreaded for him the disruption of his
daily work, his exit from the dull back study in
which he had laboured through two-and-forty years,

M "

REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

from the College in which through f our-and-seventy
years he was said to have kept every term. He
passed away in sleep, the sights and sounds which
had made the enjoyment of his life present to
him in his latest waking hours. lt In such a death,"
says Cicero in the daintiest of his treatises, " in such
a death there is neither pain nor bitterness ; but
as ripe fruit is lightly and without violence loosened
from its branch, so the soul of such departs
ungrieving from the body wherein its life's expe-
rience hath lain."

CHAPTER XI
ORIEL

" Sumnii enim stmt homines tantum"

— QUINTILIAN.

Newman — His Character and Career — Had Arnold been at Oxford
in his Time ! — Vain Speculations — Newman's Life as a Catholic
—Hawkins— Charles Marriott— Eden— The Efficacy of the
Bible — George Anthony Denison — Tom Hughes — A " Christian
Chartist" — His Radicalism — "Tom Brown" — Oxford in Fiction
— Charles Neate and John Bright — Neate, Disraeli, and the
Angels.

A HUNDRED yards from Miss Horseman's door
stands Oriel gateway. What a procession of
phantoms meets the inward eye as I approach it !
White-haired Provost Hawkins, Newman, Frederick
Rogers, Charles Marriott, Eden, Denison, " Donkey"
Litton, Low Church leader, inconspicuous in spite
of his Double First, of his recognised ability and
his two powerful volumes on " Dogmatic Theology/'
Charles Neate, the only layman of the group,
mounting his horse to join the Berkshire hounds.
I was living at Iffley during Newman's golden
time ; knew his mother in her pretty home at
Rosebank, turned afterwards into a den of dis-
orderly pupils by poor James Rumsey. I re-
member the rising of Littlemore church, first among

the new Gothic edifices which the "Movement"

179

i8o REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

revived in England ; met Newman almost daily
striding along the Oxford Road, with large head,
prominent nose, tortoiseshell spectacles, emaciated
but ruddy face, spare figure whose leanness was
exaggerated by the close-fitting tail-coat then worn.
The road ceased to know him after a time ; he had
resigned St. Mary's, and was monachising with a
few devotees in his barn-like Littlemore retreat ;
then, in 1845, Oxford lost him finally —

" Interque mserentes amicos
Egregius properabat exul ; "

to the anguish of his disciples left alone, who had
made him their pattern to live and to die ; to the
relief of many more, who thought that Humanism
and Science might reassert themselves as subject
matter of education against the polemic which had
for fifteen years forced Oxford back into the barren
word-war of the seventeenth century. By no
means a recluse like Pusey, but gregarious, hospi-
table, seminarising, he was always surrounded by
disciples, in his rooms, in Oriel Common Room, in
his Littlemore ccenobitium. But he would only
associate with like-minded men ; lived, says, Isaac
Williams, with persons younger than himself, who
would reflect his own opinions ; shrank from
healthy friction with avowedly opposed beliefs, broke
off relations with his rationalist brother Francis,
refused to see Manning, who came out to call on
him at Littlemore, in consequence of a sermon he
had preached upon the Gunpowder Plot. And so
he was not, and is not, in any sense a mystery.
While the cryptic element in Pusey's character is

ORIEL 181

deepened by the sacrilegious half-revelations of his
biographers, Newman's own " Apologia " and the
numerous tributes of his friends have shed a flood
of fierce light upon his character. If Mozley's
notices of the " Movement " are inaccurate and
flippant, Pattison's vindictive, Palmer's tedious,
Williams's jejune, Denison's irrelevant, we yet learn
something of him from them all ; while the entire
moral and intellectual epiphanies both of the
" Movement " and the man are portrayed severally
by Church and Ward.

Surveying him calmly by the light of these^
now that his great name and his enthralling
presence have become a memory, reading too the
expositions of himself which flowed so rapidly
from his pen during ten momentous years, we
seem to conceive the secret at once of his ascend-
ancy and his shipwreck. It was unfortunate for
himself and others that he should have reigned
without a rival ; his only opponents on the spot,
Faussett, Golightly, and the rest, men impares con-
gressi. The magic of his personality, the rhetorical
sweetness of his sermons — he used to say that
he read through Mansfield Park every year, in
order to perfect and preserve his style — their
dialectic vigour, championship of implicit faith as
against evidential reasoning, contagious radiance
of intense conviction, far more than the compel-
ling suasion of his arguments and theories, drew
all men after him. Had there been in Oxford at
the time a commanding representative of liberal
theology, with corresponding personal attractive-
ness, seducing piety, intellectual equipment, argu-i

1 82 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

mentative ability and promptitude ; had, for in-
stance, Arnold been resident through those years
at Oriel, not at Rugby, two camps instead of one
would have been formed, Delphi would have
been answered by Dodona ; Lake would not have
been overpowered, Stanley shaken, less by the
convincing proofs than by the unconfronted
monocracy of the magnificent system which en-
veloped them ; free play would have been proffered
to the many minds which came regretfully to
avow in later life that Newman exercised a dis-
turbing, not a quickening, influence on their
mental and religious growth. Nay, who can tell
what consequences might not have issued from
the immediate and continued contact of the two
great gladiators themselves ; how many diver-
gences might have been reconciled by the mutual
respect and the recognition of fundamental com-
munity which close collision must have produced
on two so noble natures, the hurricane of opposing
passion hushed by the still small voice of sym-
pathy which vibrates between all good men.
Both had their disabilities ; both lacked prescience,
viewing the present with a short-sighted intensity
which could not look ahead : if Arnold's consti-
tutional deficiency was unguardedness and exag-
geration, Newman's was impatience and despair.
We see his limitations clearly now ; of temper,
knowledge, mental discipline. We see haste to
be despondent in the hero of his valedictory novel,
more nakedly in his letters to his sister, until
criticism is disarmed by their agony as the crisis
^becomes inevitable.! That his secular knowledge

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

From a pen-and-ink drawing, 1841
Photographed from the Print by Mrs. Frieda Girdlestone

ORIEL 183

was limited all his reviews and essays show ;
ignorant of German as we know him to have
been, the historic development of religious reason
with its underlying unity of thought lay outside
the narrow philosophical basis on which were
reared his Anglican conclusions ; while Arnold
was just the man, invicem prcebens crura sagittis,
to elucidate, correct, counterbalance, these flaws
in his temperament and system. And if will
governed and narrowed his intellect, so did im-
patience dominate his piety and self-discipline.
Austere in his ideal of Christian life as detached,
ascetic, painful, he saw true discipleship only in
organised and formal self-surrender, such as he
found in the " regulars" of the Roman Church,
but missed in English Protestantism. A convic-
tion of his own infallibility underlies his whole
mental current ; at every succeeding stage securus
judicat, non-acceptance of his views is censurable
in individual opponents, theologically disqualifying
to their collective " note of Catholicity." How far
years might aid his aspiration, his dreams pass
into realities, his tests of Churchmanship find
fulfilment in Anglican practice, he would not
wait to see. For Teutonic slowness of appre-
hension he made no allowance, confused the
dominant instinct of startled contemporaries with
the mature resultant of education and of time.
" Had he lived to-day," said to me his old friend
Hinds Howell, who passed away but now, "had
he lived to-day, he would not have deserted his
Church." Had Heads and Bishops tolerated
" Tract 90" then, he might have died a Bishop

1 84 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

or a Head ; but, as Matthew Arnold sang of
Clough, "he could not wait their passing."

These are matters of speculation ; but it is
curious to note how, as a fact, from the moment
of his secession his commanding influence ceased.
The movement to which he had given birth
continued as we know, goes on to-day as a de-
generated mechanical survival ; that it should have
outlived its unique leader is the strongest tribute
to his creative force. On the Monday morning
when he left Manuel Johnson's house for Oscott,
he died to his old associates, to the University,
to the public. He died to his old associates :
Richmond's water-colour portrait of him leant
against Pusey's bookshelves ; his marble bust,
covered with a veil — whether from dust or from
reminiscences I never dared to ask — stood in
Keble's study ; but the three who had been as
one in spiritual kinship met only, after many
years, to find in an evening of restrained and
painful converse that the topics uppermost in the
minds of all were topics all must avoid, walking
in the house of God as adversaries, not as friends.
He died to the University : intellectual and edu-
cational changes pursued one another like surging
waves in Oxford; but the man who for fifteen
years had to all Europe personated Oxford stood
aloof from all, unconsulted, uninterposing, because
he had fallen into the pit himself had digged, in
narrowing the University from its great national,
nay worldwide, function to the limits of a divinity
school, so that, an alien in this one particular,
he became an alien in all. And as from his

ORIEL

185

brethren and from his University, so from the
public he stood separate. The days of a Richelieu
or an Alberoni are for ever past ; but that a
Roman Cardinal may popularise and exalt his
Church while he endears himself by doing battle
in English public life, as a partisan of moral re-
form, a pleader for social righteousness, a cham-
pion of the oppressed and poor against individual
and class rapacity, was shown in a series of
splendid object lessons by his fellow prelate, a
man less great, less single-minded, incomparably less
sincere, but more constitutionally altruistic, more
observant of the outer world in which he lived.
Once only in the forty years did Newman win
an audience ranging beyond controversialists and
divines, in his famous " Apologia," which will go
down, with Blanco White's " Autobiography,"
Froude's " Nemesis of Faith," and the "Phases
of Faith" of his own brother Francis, as graphic
self-dissections by men at once acutely and
intensely organised of their innermost mental
struggles amid distracting spiritual perplexities.

To what task, then, in all these years did New-
man's powerful and once restless intellect address
itself ? No longer to proselytism, to Biblical criti-
cism, to ecclesiastical reform ; he gave to old
Anglican friends who sought him out, he gave to
Denison in 1879, as to Stanley in 1864, the impression
of a tragic sadness, of a " wasted life," of fearful-
ness in the presence of advancing religious thought
and speculation, of faded ability to handle questions
with which formerly he was the first to grapple, of
the piteously recurring cry when looking beyond

1 86 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

the bars of his Oratory cage, " O, my mother !
Why dost thou leave me all day idle in the market
place?"1 He bent himself, as far as we can see,
to the subjective task of dealing with his own soul,
working out harmony in his inner nature, gaining
certainty as to his relation towards the Unseen,
security as to his future acceptance in the indistinct
domain which held dead Gerontius expectant
on his bed of sorrow. He has long since solved
the riddle. Yet, let us admit that his was not the
highest aim. The salvation of our own souls,
the abstraction of our own natures, is at best a
Buddha view of life and of eternity : the con-
sumption of self in active work for others, the
disregard of self mounting into Apostolic readiness
to be "accursed for our brethren's sake," is the
lesson of the life of Christ. Deep respect is due
to the man who flung away friends, position,
influence, in loyalty to the claim of conscience ;
deep sympathy with saintliness is an ingredient
in all highly strung spiritual natures ; but our age
more than any calls for a sword rather than
a prayer-carpet, a knight-errant rather than an
ascetic ; a Shaftesbury, a Damien, a Dolling;
rather than a Simeon Stylites battering the gates
of heaven, however high his pillar, however rapt
his insight, however vast his prospect,
i Oriel reached its highest eminence under Pro-
vosts Eveleigh and Copleston ; its decline began
with Hawkins. In 1831 he dismissed his three
great tutors, Newman, Robert Wilberforce, Froude

1 " Life of Dean Stanley," ii. 342,

ORIEL

187

whose conception of their duty to undergraduates '
threatened to establish brothers near the throne.
Mark Pattison, an Oriel undergraduate at the time,
and Dean Lake, surveying his own past university
life, agreed in attributing to Hawkins the dethrone-
ment of Oriel from its supremacy among Oxford
Colleges. Yet he was no mere fussy despot :
Newman in his " Apologia " has told us how much
he owed to him : " He taught me to weigh my words
and be cautious in my statements ; he led me to
that mode of limiting and clearing my sense in dis-
cussion and controversy which to my surprise has
since been considered to savour of the polemic of
Rome." That he should have been preferred above
Keble for the Headship testifies his extraordinaryj
reputation in the College. He piqued himself on
his attitude towards the undergraduates ; took
pains to know them individually, interviewed
each freshman privately before admitting him to
the Communion, would mitigate in Collections the
wrath expressed against some weak brother by his
tutor. One offence he could not overlook ; you
might hope for leniency in minor peccadilloes,
but you must not smell of smoke. I fear that the
youthful temperament is more alive to eccentricities
than to kindness ; the anecdotes which reach me
from old Orielites of long ago illustrate chiefly the
comic side of Hawkins' rule. He used to give one
finger to a Commoner, the whole hand to a Tuft ;
and was somewhat embarrassed when a certain man

went down at the end of Term as Mr. and

returned as Lord of . An Oriel under-
graduate took to preaching in St. Ebbe's slums.

1 88 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Hawkins angrily inhibited him. "But, sir, if the
Lord, who commanded me to preach, came sud-
denly to judgment now, what should I do ? " tl I,"
said Hawkins, " will take the whole responsibility of
that upon myself." A man begged leave to absent
himself in order to bury his uncle. ''You may
go," was the reluctant permission, "but I wish it
had been a nearer relation." In his high and dry
churchmanship he was impartially bitter. Of the
Newmania he always spoke in his exegetical ser-
mons as "the late unhappy movement." When
Irving's son obtained a First Class as Scholar of
Balliol, and wished to stand for an Oriel Fellow-
ship, the Provost refused to receive his name unless
he would formally recant his father's opinions.
When Jowett was bitten by a Balliol dog, and the
quadruped was expelled from the College, the joke
went round the University that Hawkins had re-
ceived and tenderly entertained it. He was monarch
of the old Hebdomadal Board, and was amazed
when Lake, as Senior Proctor, had the temerity to
oppose him. I remember his declaiming once in
Congregation on the "very arduous duties of a
College Head." Thorold Rogers got up and de-
clared that while he did not exactly know what
the Provost's duties were, he would be happy to
discharge them for half the Provost's salary. Said
Moral Philosophy Wilson, who was sitting by me :
" It is the right thing to say, but it wanted a brigand
to say it." His mind lacked largeness : a master of
detail he was deficient in grasp, and lived amongst
minutiae till his accuracy became pettiness, his
conscientiousness scrupulosity, his over exactness

ORIEL 189

destructive of sentiment and warmth. His char-
acter was summarised by Charles Neate :

" His est Prepositus,
Cunctis oppositus ;
Qui magna gerit,
Et tempus terit,
Dum parva quserit.
Vir reverendus —
Sed— diligendus."

Of the minora sidera which revolved round New-
man, Charles Marriott, fyCkaira'Tos tflp€*fo*v, was
the most notable. Saving every penny for chari-
table uses, he dressed like a beggar, with a veil
over his weak eyes in summer and a dark green
shade in winter, draped in a cloak made of two old
M.A. gowns unequally yoked together. He often
took me for walks, premising always that he had
no small talk, and that I must not be offended if
he were silent ; but it was easy to draw him out,
and he would discourse with a kind of dry enthu-
siasm on some of his philanthropic schemes —
economic, social, educational. He contributed
several hundred pounds to a co-operative en-
terprise, called the " Universal Purveyor." The
project was commercially sound, but engineered
by a sleek French scoundrel, who went off with
all poor Marriott's money. I met this adven-
turer once in his rooms at breakfast ; the
beast gave his host at parting what he called a
" Christian kiss " on either cheek. He turned out
to be a spy in the pay of Louis Napoleon. I saw
Marriott in his last illness, visiting him at Bon-
church, with R. F. Wilson, Keble's curate at Amp

190 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

field, Newman's friend and correspondent. As I
entered his room he eagerly greeted me, and asked
me to tell him the cube root of i. His brother
John hushed him with a "dear Charles," and he
became silent, with that queer tightening of the
jaw which some of us remember well. But his
half-paralysed brain was still active and his sense
of fun acute. A new lodging house, ugly, com-
fortless, uninviting, had been built close by ; the
owner asked John Marriott what he should call
it. Charles suggested the Redan — it was the time
of our repulse before Sebastopol — " because it
would never be taken."

Marriott inherited Newman's rooms, Eden suc-
ceeded to his parish. Burgon says of Eden that
he strained his friends' affection by conceit and
arrogance, meaning probably that he now and
then rapped Burgon's knuckles, a feat which might
cover a multitude of sins. To my recollection he
was supremely agreeable in society. A dinner-
party would be assembled in some stiff Head's or
Professor's house, no convivial water for the feet
or ointment for the head of entering guests, Dons
and Donnas dull and silent in the drawing-room
like Wordsworth's party in a parlour ; when Eden
was announced. In he would dart, his droll hare-
lipped face radiant with reaction from a hard
morning's work and with generous prandial ex-
pectancy ; would snatch a book from the table or
an ornament from the shelf, as text for a vagrant
cheery disquisition taking in all the solemn mutes in
turn, till a general thaw set in, and we went down
to a successful dinner. His manner in church was

ORIEL 191

quaint ; the matter of his sermons terse and
scholar-like, but the manuscript held close to the
candle and read without pretence of oratory, the
voice coming and going in fitful gusts now forte
now piano. He could not stand coughers : " if
worshippers cannot restrain their coughs, they
would better go out," he used to say in eager,
snapping tones. He had a great horror, too, of
casual lookers-in, migrants, who taste successive
churches in turn; " Rovers never grow" was his
frequent dictum. He had a theory that the letter
of the Bible carried sacramental efficacy, that
merely to read it to a worldling or a reprobate
would drive out devils and sow germinating seeds.
He tried it once on poor old Miss Horseman, who
was in his parish and supposed to be near her end.
She told me that he walked into her drawing-room,
said no word, took down and opened her big
Bible, read it to her for half-an-hour, and again
without farewell departed. He, of course, suc-
ceeded only in alarming and disturbing her ; to a
chapter of the Bible she had no objection, but
her formal old-fashioned breeding was outraged
by his unceremonious aggression. When he left
St. Mary's for the College living of Aberford, a
large congregation came to hear his farewell ser-
mon, prepared for an affecting and larmoyant vale-
diction. He preached on some ordinary topic;
then shut up his sermon case with a slap : " The
volume — of the book — of my ministry among you
— is closed. It is sealed up — and will be opened
at the Judgment Day."

Of George Anthony Denison — picturesque and

192 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

exasperating, eccentric and impracticable, stormy
petrel in every row, at Oxford as at Eton, during
sixty years ; restlessly pugnacious as a divine, dis-
appointingly irrelevant as a writer ; like Sydney
Smith in his estimate of the Church as a social
bulwark, like Newman in his assumption of her
historic and spiritual claims — I have a word or two
to say. He was the best of Hawkins' Tutors ; but
Mark Pattison, who attended his lectures, speaks
of him as deficient in illuminative and stimulating
force, gathering all his erudition from the printed
notes to the text-book read. And as in scholarship
so in theology he was far below the giants of the
" Movement " ; he had neither Newman's fascina-
tion of moral earnestness and literary style, nor
Liddon's later doctrinal enthusiasm, nor Pusey's
fathomless abyss of learning ; he had not even
Henry of Exeter's versatile facility in getting up a
case and working it with a forensic adroitness
which only the initiated could expose. His force
was purely gladiatorial, his motive power personal ;
the side he had adopted, the position he had taken
up, became in his eyes sacramental, opposition to it
criminal and blasphemous. When, in 1863, Pusey
proposed a compromise to end the Jowett strife,
Denison gathered the country clergy in defiance of
his old chief, ascending the steps of the semicircle
in the Theatre in order to expound to us in Latin
the causes " quia discedo ab amicis mets." I re-
member the roar of displeasure which cut him
short, the scream of " Procacissimi pueri" with
which he descended, the curious subsequent mis-
take, when Chambers, the Proctor, announced the

ORIEL 193

result of the voting by li Majori parti placet" ; then,
blushing and confused, gave way to his fellow
Proctor, Kitchin, who dashed the exultation of
Jowett's friends by the amended proclamation,
" Majori parti non placet." His sermons were mina-
ciously dogmatic, alienating to large-minded and
thoughtful men, grateful only to the prepossession
which prefers petulant insistence to sweet reason-
ableness in argument and appeal. He ruled his
clergy in Somersetshire imperiously ; I always felt
sorry for his Bishop. The only man among them
who could stand up to him was Clark, the Vicar of
Taunton, a man of temperament much akin to his
Archdeacon's, but apt to disregard the convenances
of gentle breeding which in all his outbreaks
governed Denison. Agreeable in society he
always was ; it was Stanley's delight to place him
at the Deanery table among men whom he had
just been traducing in the Jerusalem Chamber, and
who found their malignant censor transformed
into a cheery equal, friendly, anecdotic, convivial.
"There are men," he would say to you, as, after
vilipending you all the morning, he asked you to take
wine with him at luncheon, " there are men whose
persons I love and whose opinions I abhor, and
there are men whose opinions I honour and whose
selves I hate." And this quality redeemed him ;
without it he would have been a mere firebrand —
to some he seemed so all along ; but those who saw
him in his softer hour — and many such remain —
those especially who watched him presiding over
his parish water storage and harvest home fes-
tivities, still send from the railway windows as

N

194 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

they shoot past Brent Knoll a benediction, half
humorous, half affectionate ; echo regretfully the
Tanden requiescit of Lord Lyttelton's burlesque
epitaph.1 {t Requiescat," they will add, " but not
in pace; peace would destroy his paradise ! "

Associated ever in my mind with Denison, not
by similitude, but by graphic contrast, is his junior
at Oriel by some fourteen years, Tom Hughes. He
came up in 1842 ; men knew him as an athletic,
pleasant fellow, pulling always in fours and eights,
eclipsed somewhat by his then more notable brother
George. Between George Hughes and Denison
there were many points of resemblance, but Tom
was everything that Denison was not. Denison
was a Don, Tom was a Bohemian ; Denison a
sacerdotalist in white cravat and Master's hood,
Hughes a humanist in flannel shirt and shooting
jacket. Denison was an incarnation of lost causes,
Hughes the pilot of a beneficent future. Denison
rode a painted rocking-horse to tilt with theological
windmills, Tom rushed to spike the guns of social
selfishness, like his own East in the trenches of the
Sutlej forts. The historian of the century, if he
recalls Denison at all, will speak of him as the high-
bred clerical aristocrat, relic of a class extinct. He
will extol Hughes as pioneer of a new and ardent
realism, shaping itself to-day under fresh conditions,
yet essentially accordant with his creed ; as labour-
ing to alleviate the discontent of the many by the
self-sacrifice of the few, to extinguish class antago-
nism and bridge social chasm, to replace an oligarchy
of prescriptive privilege, rank, and wealth, by a
1 Appendix O.

ORIEL 195

nobler timocracy of eminence in intellectual ac-
quirement and in evangelical generosity of aim.
Even as an undergraduate Hughes was a " Christian
Chartist/' in full sympathy with the passionate dis-
content which English proletarian misery well
justified, yet holding that the party of upheaval
must be led by men of property and social rank, if
civil war were to be averted by peaceful civic re-
construction. His Radicalism, both at Oxford and
elsewhere, was ludicrously composite ; Colonel
Newcome's electoral programme is hardly a
travesty of Hughes : " He was for having every
man to vote, every poor man to labour short time
and get high wages, every poor curate to be paid
double or treble, every bishop to be docked of his
salary and dismissed from the House of Lords ; but
he was a staunch admirer of that assembly and a
supporter of the rights of the Crown." And this
political confusedness was his strength as a social
iconoclast. The unwashed rallied round a gentle-
man who was for abolishing the very rich and very
poor, round a Christian who read Socialism into
every page of the New Testament ; the aristocracy
gave ear of necessity to the well-dressed, well-bred
school and University man, who from their own
point of view and in their own interest preached
reform as alternative to revolution. So for a time
the school of Maurice, Kingsley, Hughes, shaped
the sentiment and coloured the literature of the
country ; until, when from the Chartism of the
Forties was by degrees evolved the Collectivism of
the Eighties, older Radicals shrank back alarmed
before the Demos which they had nursed com-
placently^in its childhood.

196 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Of his books, two alone probably will live. The
"Scouring of the White Horse," racy but local,
interests those only who are familiar with that
pleasant, sleepy, peaceful Berkshire vale ; his
" Memoirs of a Brother" leaves, unintentionally
and quite incorrectly, the impression that the
muscular representative of the Uffington Hugheses
must have been an oppressively pragmatical hero ;
but theme and treatment combine to make the
two "Tom Browns" immortal. I know no more
cogent tribute to Arnold's greatness than that
Rugby alone of all public schools should have
earned world-wide celebrity by an unrivalled
biography and an unrivalled epic, both stamped
in every page with his pre-inspiring impulse, both
lit from the torch of his Idaean fire. Of Rugby,
though not of Arnold, Hughes was a better inter-
preter than Stanley. Dean Lake used to say that
Stanley never was a boy ; he left school as
he entered it, something between girl and man.
Hughes was puerilissimus, boy in virtues and in
foibles ; and as, on the one hand, Stanley could
not delineate the rough-and-tumble life which
moulds nine-tenths of public school boys, could
never have appreciated or described the football
match, or the fight with Slogger Williams, so, on
the other hand, the tribute which Hughes pays
to Arnold attests that wonderful schoolmaster's
electric influence on unreceptive ordinary natures
such as Brown's and East's, no less than on the
exceptional temperaments of a Vaughan, a Clough,
a Stanley. Of course, in both books Tom is
Hughes himself; Arthur, according to Rugby

ORIEL

197

tradition, was a boy named Orlebar ; the " young
master " was Cotton ; East in the one book, Hardy
in the other, are probably mere types. And,
though continuations are usually disappointing,
I should place "Tom Brown at Oxford" not
one whit behind its predecessor. Recalling the
higher fictions which deal with undergraduate life,
"Reginald Dalton," "Vincent Eden," « Peter
Priggins," "Loss and Gain," "Verdant Green/'
the Cambridge chapter in "Alton Locke," the
Boniface chapter in ll Pendennis," I rank "Tom
Brown " before them all for the vigour and the
completeness of its portrayal. Every phase of
College life as it exuberated seventy years ago —
fast and slow, tuft and Bible clerk, reading
man and lounger ; profligacy and debt, summer
term and Commemoration, boat races, wines,
University sermons, — passes easily in review, with-
out Kingsley's hysteria, without Newman's prig-
gishness, without Hewlett's vulgarity, without
Lockhart's stiltedness, without Cuthbert Bede's
burlesque. The New Zealander of A.D. 4000,
visiting the tangled morasses of the Upper Thames
which once were Oxford, the crumbling chaos
of rotting carriages and twisted rails which
once was Rugby, will annotate his monumental
work on "Ancient England" with Tom Brown's
pictures of their ruined sites and Tom Brown's
chronicles of their academic humour. They seem
to me somehow memorials of a life fuller, more
varied, more youthful, than is proved to-day by
our golden or our gilded juvenility. Stagecoaches,
postchaises, peashooters meant more fun than

198 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

first-class carriages and railway novels ; boys were
" fellows" then, now, save the mark! they are
"men"; undergraduates who crowded formerly
the coffee rooms of the Old and New Hummums,
Tavistock, Bedford, melt to-day into a mammoth
hotel, gravitate after play and supper to music-halls
and casinos, instead of applauding Herr von Joel
or shaking hands with Paddy Green at Evans'.
I am a fogey, to be sure, and out of date ; but,
remembering the days when I rode from Southam
to Rugby on the " Pig and Whistle," or was
dropped at the Mitre by Jack Adams from the
box of the Royal Defiance, the days when Cowley
Marsh was a rush-grown common, and from
Magdalen bridge to Iffley there was not a single
roadside house, I feel for those ancient ways and
vanished hours what our present youngsters will
mayhap feel for their own some ten or twelve
lustres hence, and I bless the hand that has pre-
served the verdure of their antiquity with a pen
whose vigour and a heart whose freshness bid
antiquity defiance.

I have travelled far from Oriel ; I return to
find Charles Neate on horseback at the Corpus
corner, his face set towards the meet at Brasenose
Wood. He began life as1, a barrister, but was
disbarred for horsewhipping — (so says one tradi-
tion ; for kicking, says another), Bethell, known
later as Lord Westbury, then as afterwards the
tyrant of the profession, who had insulted him in
court. He was cosmopolitan, at home in Paris,
a member of London clubs, a mighty hunter. He

ORIEL 199

stood for Oxford City in the Fifties as a Radical,
and was elected, but unseated for bribery, negotiated
I was told, by one of his committee, and without
his knowledge. While in the House he became
intimate with John Bright. I have heard him
describe their first accost. The smoking-room
was crowded ; Bright sat upon one chair, and
leaned his arm across the back of another. Neate
asked him if he required two seats. " Yes, I do ;
but I'll get you another "—which he did. Neate
gave his name, and a friendship soon sprang
up. He brought Bright down to Oxford; they
came together to a Congregation, where we were
voting on some election. The papers, having been
counted by the Proctors and the result announced,
were burned on a brazier in the room, a custom
long since extinct ; Bright expressing his amused
delight — it was before the Ballot — to find the secret
vote enforced in the University of Oxford. Neate
was in the Theatre when Dizzy made his famous
" angel " speech, at a meeting of the Diocesan
Association, S. Oxon in the chair. "What is the
question now placed before society with a glib
assurance the most astounding ? The question
is this — Is man an ape or an angel ? My lord,
I am on the side of the angels." Neate, in a
delicious set of Sapphics,1 inclined rather to range
the great posture master on the other side :

"Angela quis te similem putaret
Esse, vel divis atavis creatum,
Cum tuas plane referat dolosas
Simius artes ? "

1 Appendix P.

CHAPTER XII

BALLIOL

" There is a history in all men's lives
Figuring the nature of the times deceased;
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life, which in their seeds
And weak beginnings lie intreasured."

— SHAKESPEARE.

Two Masters of Balliol — Jenkyns and Jowett — The One who came
between — The Succession to Scott — Temple and Jowett — Henry
Wall — Dean Lake — "The Serpent" — Lake on Arnold — Jowett
and Dr. Johnson — Obiter Dicta — A Conversation — Jowett's un-
familiarity with Natural Science — Temple — T. H. Green.

FOR elderly men of to-day the term " Master of
Balliol" conjures up two visions. They think of
Jenkyns in the Thirties and Forties, of Jowett in
the Seventies and Eighties ; they do not think of
Scott, who came between. Overlaid, enveloped,
eclipsed by the two luminaries who " went behind
him and before," he somehow drops out of sight ;
his reign is an intervention, and is remembered
only with an effort. His was a career of early
promise unusual, but unfulfilled. He came from
Shrewsbury to Oxford as the best of Butler's pupils,
won the Craven and Ireland and the Latin Essay,
was First Class man and Fellow of Balliol. His
notes to the "Uniomachia" and his Homerics on
the Chancellorship showed rare aptness and re-

BALLIOL

201

source in the exceptional felicities of Greek and
Latin scholarship. In 1834, the year after his
degree, Talboys, the leading Oxford bookseller,
proposed to him to undertake the translation of
Passow's German-Greek Lexicon ; he consented
on condition that with him Liddell might be
associated. The Lexicon appeared in 1843 ; the
first edition is now a curious rarity; when shortly
before his death Liddell wished to place it in the
Christchurch Library, it was long before he could
obtain a copy. Their several shares in it cannot
be known : Westminster naturally placed Scott
below Liddell in its construction. The well-known
lines,

" Two men wrote a Lexicon, Liddell and Scott ;
One half was clever, one half was not.
Give me the answer, boys, quick, to this riddle,
Which was by Scott, and which was by Liddell ? "

were an epigram sent up by a boy at the " trials "
for the Maunday Thursday money, on the thesis
" Scribimus indocti doctique." The Rev. W. G.
Armitstead, Vicar of Goosetree, writes to me that
he was present in school as a boy when the lines
were composed, and according to custom were
read aloud by Liddell, who complimented their
author with the full four-coin meed of fourpenny>
threepenny, twopenny, penny silver pieces, awarded
to the best composition. A more decided view of
the two partners' relative claims emanated from
Balliol, in a not very elegant triplet :

" Part of it's good, and part of it's rot :
The part that is good was written by Scott :
By Liddell was written the part that is not."

202 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Scott retired to a College living; and the later
editions, changing a tentative into a masterpiece,
owed most of their excellence to Liddell, whose
desire for its linguistic revision by Max Miiller was
foiled by Scott's apathy or opposition. In 1854
the old Master died, the College was divided as
to his successor. The senior Fellows wished for
Temple, an equal number of the juniors wished
for Jowett ; James Riddell wanted Scott, but
would vote for Jowett rather than for Temple. So
at the last moment Temple's supporters threw him
over for Scott, securing Riddell's vote. For ten
years he was an obstructive, wielding his numerical
ascendancy to crush all Jowett's schemes of reform.
"Your head," said Jowett to a Fellow of another
College, " seems to be an astute person, who works
by winning confidence ; here we have a bare
struggle for power " ; and when, in 1865, successive
elections to Fellowships had given Jowett a
majority, Scott's influence in the College waned.
Nor was he effective beyond the walls of Balliol.
Soon after his appointment he preached a magnifi-
cent University sermon on Dives and Lazarus,
with application of the "five brethren" episode to
the home ties, feelings, scruples, tenderness of
undergraduates. When he next occupied the
pulpit, St. Mary's was filled from entrance door to
organ screen; but the sermon was absolutely dull
— on Hezekiah's song — nor did he ever again
command an audience ; in his Headship as i-n
his earlier career he left, as some one says, a
great future behind him. In 1870 Gladstone, at
Lowe's entreaty, appointed him to the Deanery of

BALLIOL 203

Rochester in order to make room for Jowett, and
he descended into decanal quietude.

Scott's firmest supporter in College had been
Henry Wall, Lecturer and Bursar : he figures in
the " Grand Logic Sweepstakes" as Barbadoes,
having been born in that island. It was he who
led the opposition to Max Miiller for the "half-a-
brick" reason that he was a foreigner. His intellect
was clear, logical, penetrating; his temper some-
what arrogant. His lectures, which as Prelector
of Logic he delivered publicly in Balliol Hall to all
who chose to bring the statutory guinea, were
cosmic in their reduction and formularisation of
the Aldrich-Aristotle chaos. Keen-eyed, sharp-
nosed, vehement in manner and gesture, he fired
off questions as he went along at this or that student
who caught his eye, with joyous acceptance of a
neat response, scornful pounce on a dull or inat-
tentive answerer. He was an undesirable dinner
guest, starting questions which he seemed to have
prepared beforehand for the pleasure of showing
off his dexterity in word fence, rousing temper, and
spoiling conversational amenities. He was a great
dancer : the waltz of those days was a serious
department of life, "to be wooed with incessant
thought and patient renunciation of small desires."
Readers of " Pelham " — does any one read " Pelham "
now ?— will remember how Lady Charlotte im-
pressed upon her fashionable son the moral duty
of daily practice, with a chair if no partner could
be obtained ; and to see Wall's thin legs twinkle in
the mazy was a memorable experience. He was
exceedingly hospitable ; giving dances, sometimes

264 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

on a large scale in Wyatt's Rooms, oftener at his
snug little house in New Inn Hall Lane, to the
music of old Grimmett's harp and fiddle. With
him lived a stout, florid sister, dressed in many-
coloured garments, a niece whom pupils knew as
"Bet," and a Pomeranian " Fop " who suffered
many things when his master's back was turned.
He was great in charades, personating now a Radical
mob orator, now an ancient crone, now a shy,
clumsy, gaping freshman. When well on in years
he made a January and May marriage ; the bachelor
home was recast; poor Bet had died, Fop had
borne his mistress company to that equal sky,
the jovial sister subsided into small lodgings over
a baker's shop in Holywell : miscentur Mcenia
luctu.

Senior to Scott and Wall was the redoubtable
Francis Newman, whose " Phases of Faith " will
probably preserve his name. He gained a Double
First in 1826, being the first man who ever offered
in the Schools the Higher Mathematics analytically
treated. Cooke, afterwards Sedleian Reader, pro-
nounced that they could not, according to the
Statute, pass beyond the Geometry of Newton ;
but Walker, Experimental Philosophy Professor,
who probably of the three examiners alone knew
the subject, persuaded his colleagues to let him
examine Newman in the work he offered ; and the
candidate's answers were so brilliant, that the
examiners, not content with awarding his First,
presented him with finely bound copies of La Place
and La Grange. He once or twice stayed with me
at Taunton, sending word beforehand that he was a

BALLIOL 205

vegetarian, but eating copiously of fish and eggs.
In company he did not so much converse as emit
pilulous dogmas from his thin lips in a prim,
didactic, authoritative tone ; — on Ghosts and Fairy
Legends as appropriate to children's minds, on the
Teutonic view of the Devil with its humorous tinge,
on Almsgiving in the streets, on Home Tooke and
Cobbett, on the position of women in Society, on
phonetic spelling, on the Saturday Review. I re-
member too his delivering a fluent, venomous
Philippic against Physical Science, in which he had
observed me to be deeply interested. He was a slave
to total abstinence, to anti-vaccination, to every kind
of fad. He would stalk the streets with me, silent
and absorbed, in a Tyrolese hat, and a short cloak
with long tassels, winning from the street-boys
rather formidable attentions :

" Statua taciturnius exit
Plerumque, et risu populum quatit."

Prominent in College work and discipline, and
dying at a great age only a few years ago, was Dean
Lake. I saw him first in 1842, when Clough, with
whom I was reading at the time, took me to breakfast
in his rooms. They looked into the quad ; and
as we stood at the window after breakfast he pointed
out a black-haired, smooth-cheeked, ruddy under-
graduate, and said, " Notice that man ; he will be
our Double First this year." It was Temple ; and
I went with Clough into the Schools to hear his
Viva Voce. Lake was kind to me after that ; one
day took me for a walk. We encountered his
doctor in Broad Street, and they stopped to talk.

206 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

He was looking wretchedly ill, red-nosed, pale, and
thin, admitted in answer to questions that he had
fasted during Lent ; and I listened unnoticed to the
wise earnestness with which the doctor, a man
greatly respected and beloved, urged upon him the
duty of caring for his body as the condition of all
useful work. As a fact, the phase of feeling which
took shape with him in bodily maceration was a
transient one ; he had been bitten by the Newmania,
but he soon, like Goldsmith's man of Islington,
recovered of the bite. He was not liked either as
Tutor or as Proctor. His manner was cold, sar-
castic, sneering ; and a certain slyness earned him
the nickname of " Serpent," applied originally at
Rugby in reference to his sinuous shuffling
walk, and retained by Balliol undergraduates
as characterising his methods of College dis-
cipline.

It is no less significant of the deviating intellectual
vacillations, which in spite of his great abilities
disqualified him for leadership, and go far to explain,
what has been often cited as unintelligible, his
failure to attain conspicuous and commanding
eminence. When, in 1849, young Lancaster of
Balliol, for playfully fastening up and painting a
Tutor's oak, was summoned before a Common
Room meeting to receive sentence, the scene was
thus rendered by a forgotten wit : —

Incipit "Jinks."

And first out spake "the Master": "The young man must

go down,
And when a twelvemonth has elapsed he may resume his

gown."

BALLIOL 207

Serpens sequitur.

And the Serpent's brow was calm, and the Serpent's voice

was low ;

" I'm sorry, Mr. Lancaster, but really you must go.
The fact has come so clearly before the Tutor's knowledge,
And if we once pass over this, what rules can bind the College ?"

Lancaster respondet.

Then out spake Harry Lancaster, that man of iron pate :
" I know, ye Dons, I must have gone a mucker soon or late ;
But this I say, and swear it too, without or cheek or funk,

The Tutor may have been screwed up, I'm if / was

drunk."

He left to Mrs. Goddard the packing of his togs,
He paid no ticks, with chums exchanged no farewell dialogues ;
But in a fury flinging down
His academic cap and gown,
And striding madly through the town,
Rushed, headlong, to the dogs !

Lake bore, for strictly Balliol consumption, another
playful sobriquet, an obvious degradation of his
name. Walking one day with John Conington,
he said, "Do you know, Conington, that the men
call you the Sick Vulture ? " Conington turned
on him his blank, pallid moon-face, and said,
" Do you know, Lake, that the men call you
Puddle?" There is of the retort yet another
rendering, which I cannot bring myself to write.
In 1858 he took the College living of Huntspill,
then a very valuable incumbency, but a secluded,
unhealthy, stagnant village in the Bristol Channel
marshes. He was not the man to spend there
much of his time : he kept a capable curate, a
muscular Christian he half admiringly, half con-
temptuously, called him ; and lived mostly in

208 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

London, enjoying club life at the Athenaeum, and
labouring for a long time on the Duke of New-
castle's Education Commission. I remember
standing with him at the Highbridge Station,
when one of his principal farmers came up and
said, "We don't see much of you at Huntspill,
Mr. Lake." "You may depend upon it," said the
faithful herdman, "that you won't see more of
me than I can help." He was one of the most
active members of the Commission, supporting
the large recommendations which, novel and
startling at the time, were all eventually embodied
in Mr. Forster's Act. He told me that the secre-
tary, Fitzjames Stephen, a man in the habit of
riding rough-shod over his fellows, tried to domi-
nate and bully the Commissioners. They deputed
to Lake the task of extinguishing him, and in
rebuke to some instance of unwarrantable inter-
ference he went across to the secretary and ex-
plained to him with serpentine grace that he was
intruding on their prerogative and must confine
himself to his proper function. The hint was
taken perforce ; but one of the reporters said
afterwards to Lake, "The expression of Mr.
Stephen's countenance when you spoke to him,
sir, was truly diabolical." I saw a good deal of
him during his visits to Huntspill. He attended
educational meetings in which I was interested,
an animated, nay violent speaker : arms and coat-
tails flew about while he strode hither and thither :
for his after-dinner orations we used to clear out
of his way the wineglasses and other unstable
appurtenances of dessert. Of clerical assemblies

BALLIOL

209

he fought shy. Posing at that time as an advanced
Liberal and a Broad Churchman, his plea for un-
fettered admission of Nonconformists to all our
schools, and his denunciation of Bishop Gray,
just then tramping Somersetshire in his crusade
against Colenso, gave deep offence to Philistia.
He would have liked to be Regius Professor of
Divinity, and was bitterly savage at Payne Smith's
appointment. Lord Palmerston consulted Jeune ;
and Jeune, who while solitary as Vice-Chancellor
in the Long Vacation had seen much of Smith,
then a sub-librarian at the Bodleian, was impressed
by his Oriental erudition and his views on Mes-
sianic prophecy, and named him at once. I
dare say the Chair lost nothing by his occupancy
rather than by Lake's, who was but an amateur
theologian ; his conception of theology not Bib-
lical criticism, hermeneutics, exegesis, scientific
discernment of the spiritual unity underlying all
higher forms of religion, but the regulation dog-
matism which is in request with Anglican bishops
and equips for Anglican Orders.

None the less, at every period of his life, he
showed himself extraordinarily capable. His Rugby
schooldays placed him in the inner circle of
Arnold's best beloved and cherished pupils : as
a Balliol Tutor he was among the first to initiate
that higher view of the relation between teacher
and taught which Jowett carried to perfection.
The organisation of the new School of Law and
Modern History in 1853 was placed almost en-
tirely in his hands. When he was appointed by
the War Office in 1856 on a Commission of In-

O

210 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

quiry into the great continental military schools,
his two associates, both officers of high rank, bore
testimony to the valuable non-professional influ-
ence on their counsels of a civilian so highly
educated, so tactful, so consummate in practical
aptitude. At Durham he used his decanal autho-
rity to facilitate the establishment of a Newcastle
Science College which Huxley had long been
urging. He reanimated the moribund Durham
University, raising the number of students from
fifty to two hundred ; and he restored to dignity
and beauty the inadequate services and decaying
fabric of the grand Cathedral.

He was not always facile a vivre : many persons
noted and still recall him as cold, stern, masterful.
Shy he may have been — it is the accepted excuse
for stiffness — superior to his company he must
often have felt himself ; and, a Don by constitution
and training, he was more likely to exhibit such
consciousness than to veil it. But with intimates
he was cordial, trustful, staunch, affectionate ; and
he never forgot old friends. In the company of
such he was a very charming talker ; his con-
versation not so much ornate with anecdote,
quotation, epigram, as fresh and mobile through
its vivid recollection of events, places, men ; keenly
logical without pedantry, flowing in crisp, well
poised, comprehensive sentences, mindful ever of
the colloquial rights of others.

He stayed in my house more than once, full
always of interesting talk. He gave us one even-
ing a minute description of Dr. Arnold's death.
He was a guest in the School House at the time ;

BALLIOL 211

the five younger children had gone to Fox How,
and all were to follow in a day or two, when
the school should have broken up. He and the
Doctor strolled till dusk on the Sunday evening
in the Head Master's garden overlooking the
School Close. Their talk was of the New Testa-
ment writers, and he recalled the almost angry
vehemence with which Arnold resented a prefer-
ence of St. Paul to St. John. The great Head
Master died early next morning, and Lake went
down to Fox How with the tidings. He dwelt
on the pathos of the journey, the beauty of the
Rothay Valley as he drove along it from the
head of Windermere in the early summer dawn,
the exquisite peacefulness of the tree-shaded home.
It was Arnold's forty-seventh birthday, and the
children had prepared to celebrate it; they were
waked instead to learn the news, and went back
with Lake to see their father's face in death. He
went on to talk of his old master, depreciating
the value of his influence. Electric and over-
powering, it was, he said, more than boys nature
could stand ; coming on them prematurely, in-
fusing priggishness rather than principle. " Hal-
ford Vaughan once agreed with me that it took
five years to recover from the mental and moral
distortion which it involved." One trait of char-
acter, said to have been strongly marked at Oxford,
we noticed in him more than once, a sort of
superior tuft-hunting : not, of course, the vulgar
deference to social rank and wealth, but a rather
too exclusive pursuit of and attention to the man
of highest note in any company. I met him once

212 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

at a large dinner party. He found me alone when
he entered, and began to talk ; presently the Head
Master of Winchester was announced, and for him
Lake naturally left me. But on the arrival of
Eothen Kinglake the Head Master found himself
deserted ; and when the party was joined by
Temple, then in the splendour of his pre-episcopal
repute, Eothen in his turn was dropped. Of
course, we the rejected ones, combining on the
common ground of supersession, discussed our
friend's peculiarity with good-humoured impar-
tiality.

He was in his last days every inch a Dean. His
tall figure and authoritative diction suited the
hieratic consequence of gaiters and apron. His
departure left a gap, which, happily for the Cathe-
dral and the University, came to be filled by a
successor of attainments not less brilliant and of
presence equally imposing. Reckoning him up from
his Oxford and his Huntspill days, I should say
that he was too self-centred and withdrawn, too
aggressively the superior person, to be popular ;
that, winning an undoubtedly high position, his
performance scarcely equalled the expectation men
had formed of him ; that he remained through life
a conspicuous and interesting figure rather than
an effectual and influential force.

Of Jowett I shall not say much. The "Jowler
myths " served their purpose and are exploded ;
the facts of his life are told abundantly in the
Biography, a book which for my own part I
never open without extracting from it gold unal-
loyed. I was so fortunate once as to meet him

BALLIOL

in a country house ; in such retreats he was
always at his best, communicative, receptive, easy.
The talk turned on obscure passages in well-known
poems — Tennyson's "one clear harp," Newman's
" those angel faces" — which their authors when
challenged could not or would not explain. He
quoted Goldsmith and Johnson's colloquy over
the word "slow" in the opening line of "The Tra-
veller." Asked by some one if he meant tardiness
of locomotion, Goldsmith said yes. Johnson inter-
posed, "No, sir, you do not mean tardiness of
locomotion ; you mean that sluggishness of mind
which comes upon a man in solitude." He repeated
the paragraph exactly, rolling it out with relish.
Our host, his old pupil, told us afterwards that
he believed Jowett knew his Boswell by heart ;
no book oftener on his lips or pen. We passed
to the "base Judaean " in "Othello." "Herod
and Mariamne," Barabas and his daughter in the
"Jew of Malta," were proposed as illustrations.
The last interested him much, and he asked many
questions about the play, which he seemed not
to have read ; but next morning he said, " I have
been thinking it over ; it can only mean the
Jewish nation and Christ." He went on to con-
demn Gervinus' Commentary, but found we were
all against him. A lady asked him whether Bishop
Butler's saying is sound, that, in general no part
of our time is more idly spent than the time spent
in reading. He roused himself to utter very em-
phatically, "No." "Mr. Pattison says so." "Mr.
Pattison would make all reading difficult, he would
have it so perfect and accurate." "Yet one sits at

2i4 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

the feet of a great man." "You would not give
up your common-sense if you do sit at a great
man's feet." She asked his opinion of Greg. He
spoke admiringly of his " Enigmas " ; went on to
describe him as a most curious little man, aged
seventy, just married, likely to be always weigh-
ing his wife's qualities and to molest her when
he found them wanting. Then we discussed old
Oxonians. He spoke with absolute reverence of
Arnold. Pusey, he thought, had deteriorated ; once
innocent and a saint, he had become "cunning
and almost worldly." Temple, too, had suffered
from episcopacy. He pronounced the best Oxford
Colleges — it was in 1874 — to be Balliol, New Col-
lege, University, Trinity, Lincoln. He withdrew
after breakfast to his Plato, but we had a long
walk on Exmoor in the afternoon. As we sat
on the hillside, watching the " shadowy main dim-
tinted," along which wounded Arthur was borne
by weeping queens in dusky barge to Avilion, the
blue Atlantic water of the incoming tide pushing
itself in great wedges up the brown Severn sea,
I picked up and showed him a chunk of old red
sandstone at my feet, flecked with minute white
spots, which under my Coddington lens became
lichens exquisite in shape and chasing. I recall
his almost childlike amazement and delight, his
regretful confession that to his mind all natural
science was a blank, wisdom at one entrance quite
shut out. He would have been the first to re-
pudiate the self-consciousness of omniscience sug-
gested by the famous stanza in the "Masque of
Balliol,"—

BALLIOL 415

" I come first, my name is Jowett ;
What there is to know, I know it.
I'm the Master of this College ;
What I know not is not knowledge,"

which merely recalls a saying of Madame de
Stae'l : " Monsieur ', je comprends tout ce qui merite
d'etre compris ; ce que je ne comprends nest rien"
Much the same thing is said, more audaciously, in
a German epigram —

" Gott weiss viel ;
Doch mehr der Herr Professor :

Gott weiss alles !
Doch er — alles besser."

He had, in fact, several times, with a hanker-
ing after the unknown, attended meetings of the
British Association. In one of these an amusing
incident occurred. The meeting was at Newcastle,
but on the Sunday men went to Durham, where
the fathers of the Cathedral looked askance at
the sages in their midst, and appointed Handel's
" What tho' I trace" as a significant anthem for the
Sunday service. The preacher was Dr. Sanders
Evans, a famous Cambridge Scholar, and a Shrews-
bury pupil of Butler, but a man eccentric, distrait,
and very nervous. He had prepared, for the
ordinary congregation, a learned sermon on " Essays
and Reviews," in which he had assailed the Greek
of Jowett's book on St. Paul's Epistles ; but his
heart failed him when on entering the Cathedral he
spied Jowett's white head in a stall. It is one thing
to anatomise a book, quite another to vivisect its
author, and Evans shrank from the operation.
What was to be done ? There was present in

216 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

his place a certain Canon and Archdeacon Bland,
who was known to carry a sermon in his pocket
wherever he might be. To him was sent a hurried
message, and he calmly preached his inappropriate
but harmless pocketful. Jowett was not told of the
incident, but remarked upon the badness of the
sermon.

I told, on p. 205, how, looking from Lake's Balliol
windows, I saw Temple in the Quad below. The
black-haired, smooth-cheeked, ruddy undergraduate
had passed through a Spartan training very unlike
that of his comfortably nurtured associates. He
had come from a poverty-stricken home, at whose
frugal board dry bread was the staple food ; had
been trained with his brothers and sisters to manual
labour ; the boys ploughing and gardening, the
girls working in the kitchen, house, and dairy :

" Proles Sabellis docta ligonibus
Versare glebas, et severse

Matris ad arbitrium recisos
Portare fustes."

Temple's " severa mater " was the founder of his
moral, intellectual, and religious character. Know-
ing not a word of Latin, she taught him his Eton
Latin grammar from the first page to the last ; took
him with the aid of a key through Arithmetic and
Algebra, intelligence in each case following upon
memory. Her discipline was so judicious that her
children seem never to have felt the possibility
of being other than obedient. Elected when seven-
teen years old to a Blundell Scholarship at Balliol,
he lived with strictest economy. He drank no
wine, in the coldest weather had no fire in his

BALLIOL 217

rooms, obtained his Double First entirely without
private tuition ; a feat performed, it is said, by only
one other man in undergraduate annals, the late
Bishop Stubbs. His undergraduate career coin-
cided with the crisis of the Oxford Movement : its
protagonist at Balliol was his Tutor Ward, whose
crushing logical insistency perverted Clough, im-
pelled Newman, baffled Tait, deeply influenced
Temple. He told his anxieties to his mother ; her
quiet response that he should avoid all discussion
and think only of his books gave him timely help ; he
turned from Church reform, the via media, and Tract
90, to the stern requirements of the Schools ; and his
Double First was the result. After a few years as
Balliol Tutor he became Principal of Kneller Hall,
then, Inspector of Training Colleges ; was actively
concerned with Canon Brereton and Acland in
establishing the Oxford Local Examinations; in 1857
went as Head Master to Rugby. He found it in
the trough of the wave ; came to it an Arnold
Redivivus. The boys received him with distrust ;
feared from his reforming energy the extinction of
their cherished absurdities and inherited rights ;
were startled by the contrast between Goulburn,
placid, affected, cassocked, and his successor's
wide shirt-front, rasping voice, martial stride: old
Bennett, the patriarchal School Tonsor, who had
shorn the boys' hair far back into the times of Dr.
Wooll, used to relate the consternation with which
the new Head Master was surveyed by Town and
School, as he walked up from the station in a
swallow -tailed coat, with a carpet-bag in his hand.
But the boys soon learned to love the strong, just,

2i 8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

humorous man, to respect the illuminating teacher,
to bow before the wonderful Sunday sermons,
which recalled to older listeners at once Arnold
and Newman ; while the discovery that he could
walk eighteen miles in three hours, and had
privately climbed for amusement all the big elm
trees in the School Close, captured them on their
athletic side : dislike gave way to appreciation,
appreciation to hero-worship. "Temple is all
right, mother," wrote home a Sixth Form boy whose
parents had expressed alarm as to the political
and religious influence of the new Head Master ;
" Temple is all right ; but if he turns Mahometan all
the School will turn too." So with the Masters : those
already in the School, who had hitherto resembled
independent vassals under a mediaeval monarch, at
once recognised the claims and did homage to
the strength of a suzerain who fulfilled Carlyle's
conception of the Konig ; the new comers imbibed
the influence of his character, and transmitted
it to the boys.

Why did he leave Rugby after a reign of only
twelve years ? Why exchange the freedom, inde-
pendence, animating environment of a great Head
Master for the chains which, however gilded, must
shackle an Anglican bishop ? By Englishmen
generally the step was regarded as something of a
descent ; outside his new diocese he was not quite
the man he had been before. But episcopal
trappings did not change him ; and the power which
had restored Rugby soon renovated Exeter. His
predecessor had governed by system and by fear ;
for machinery Temple substituted life ; into system

BALLIOL 219

he infused the spirit of service. Confident in his
own magnetic will — veils tantummodo, qucs tua
virtus, expugnabis — he made it his first policy to
know and to be known. Not only the popular
centres, but the small towns and villages, thinly
inhabited moors and scattered tors, whose primi-
tive tenants had never seen a bishop, faced the
virile personality, recognised the West Country
burr, heard the pleadings, passionate and some-
times tearful, which awoke spiritual consciousness
and stirred regenerating resolve. Laymen bowed
before a leader who could lead ; Dissenters saw a
new Wesley in their midst ; farmers were subju-
gated by the strong man who had himself followed
the plough ; clergy, looking at first distrustfully upon
a bishop banned by a clerical Convocation, were
shamed, then won, into acceptance and imitation.
" Every clergyman," said Dean Cowie after some
years had passed, " is doing twice as much as he did
before ; and they say it is all your doing ; " he had
not set himself to gain them, but inevitably he gained
them, because from the first he came to serve.

He moved to London in 1885 ; the loud and
universal sorrow at his departure reviving a doubt
frequently expressed, whether the translation of an
approved and popular prelate, except possibly to a
Primacy, is not in all cases a mistake. He there
strode into the heart of his work, treading on the
toes of men more sensitive than were the com-
paratively Boeotian clergy whom he had left behind
in Devonshire. Heroes built like him, "temples
without polished corners," come amongst us as his
Master came, el? /cpiaiv, to test capacity of discern-

220 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

ment, to attract nobleness, repel superficiality and
pettiness. Men priggish, self-complacent, languid,
or unreal, disliked him cordially ; the House of
Lords never to the last accepted him ; men high
minded, genuine, spiritually akin, found him out
and were drawn to him at once. Dr. Gore glorified
in receiving from him a not unmerited snub. " We
have a man here," said Capel Cure, listening to his
somewhat stern repulse of irrelevant clerical criti-
cism. "If he sometimes treated us like school-
boys," said another, " we deserved it, and were all
the better for being back in school again."

His recorded sayings, pithy or humorous, help
out our conception of the man. Such are his —
"You cannot grow genius, but you can grow
talent ; " " it is not knowledge chiefly, but char-
acter, that England wants ; " " they wish me to
formulate a policy ; I don't believe in formulated
policies ; " " one is brought through somehow if
one always does one's best;" "help in work is
something ; I want companionship more." Some
of his dicta are in a lighter mood. "I am very
pleased, my Lord," began a Very Reverend at a
missionary meeting. " You are not," snapped the
chairman, who had taught English Grammar in
his day; "you are very much pleased." "Wher-
ever I go, they give me cold chicken and 'the
Church's one foundation/ and I hate both." " My
aunt was prevented from sailing in a ship which
sank ; would you not, my Lord, call that a provi-
dential interposition ? " " Can't tell, did not know
your aunt." A vicar, pointing to a Nonconformist
Chapel — "That, my Lord, is where all the people

BALLIOL

221

go." Bishop, turning on him— " WHY?" His
rough speeches sometimes looked brutal in print,
but were not so when tempered by the merry smile
which softened them. He had a natural inborn
heartiness, Goethe's Hoftlichkeit des Herzens, the
politeness of helpful benevolent good feeling ; he
was never ill-natured or cynical ; the smooth mask
of conventional courtesy he could not wear. " I
hate civility, don't you ? "

His last public appearance many of us would
gladly forget. "That he should have been so domi-
nated by his surpliced legions," wrote to me one of
his most devoted friends and colleagues, "as to
accept Balfour's Education Bill, and then to be
cut short by fatal illness before he poured out his
whole soul in favour of making common cause
with united Christianity, is the tragedy of his life."
Yet to the old among us he stands out as a man
nobler than his fellows, laborious, disinterested,
self-reliant, with a grand conception of this life,
a clear vision of the next ; and the character has
no less its special meaning for the young. " The
air of perpetual Spring blows round his grave ; the
thought of him speaks reality and hope ; and these
are the memories which live."

The changes of Oxford life are swift ; the water
flows fast under Folly Bridge ; and to the present
generation T. H. Green is little more than a name.
Yet before his early death he had attained a repute
and wielded an influence in the University which
no one has since surpassed. His namesake the
historian, coming up to Oxford and invited by him
to dinner, sent word that "the shadow would gladly

222 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

wait upon the substance"; a distinguished states-
man still living, who has perhaps by this time
outgrown his youthful enthusiam, made a rever-
ential pilgrimage to Green's birthplace ; and the
philosopher figures in " Robert Elsmere " as the
infallible guide and oracle of his day to all who
were mentally doubtful, struggling, and distressed.
His outward life was devoid of incident : he repre-
sents the history of a mind, inert and slow at first,
feeding on its own thoughts, not on the thoughts of
others ; a plant growing, not a brick being moulded.
Both as schoolboy and undergraduate he was out
of touch with his surroundings ; he was influenced
at Oxford by Jowett, Conington, Charles Parker,
and by no one else ; the only authors who in-
spired him were Wordsworth, Carlyle, Maurice, and
Fichte. He cared little for literary scholarship,
nothing for academic distinction ; his passion was
for philosophy and metaphysics, as ministering to
the problems of life which alone he deemed worth
solving. Rival philosophers professed to see a
fundamental incoherence in his thoughts ; and the
necessary complexities of language which ham-
pered their expression were ridiculed in an amusing
verse of the " Masque of Balliol." But he helped
to form the highest minds amongst his contempo-
raries ; and those who now read the chapter of his
biography called " Religious Principles " will under-
stand the height of habitual exaltation to which
he soared ; an abiding grasp of the Unseen, of
Christianity, of the spiritual life, of human duty,
before which the dogmatic materialism of polemic
sects and schisms dwindles into littleness.

CHAPTER XIII

TRINITY

",'Tis opportune to look back upon old times: great examples
groiv thin, and to be fetched from the past world"

— SIR THOMAS BROWN.

President Ingram — Guillemard — Lord Ward — Isaac Williams —
Monsignor Patterson — Fred. Meyrick — Tommy Short.

I WAS one day in company with a distinguished
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Mention
happened to be made of an interesting Roman
dignitary lately dead, and I recalled him as in my
early days a " Fellow of Trinity." The Cambridge
Don looked up surprised and doubtful, so I hastened,
amid the great amusement of the company, to
explain that there exists at Oxford a College which
presumes to bear that name, and that to this
College Monsignor Patterson had belonged. To
be sure, our Trinity cannot hang over its high
table portraits of Bacon and Newton, nor have its
recent Heads ranked with Whewell for omni-
science or for wit" with Thompson ; but it has
played a famous part, and to my own memory it
is fragrant. Its President in my early days was
Ingram, antiquary, Anglo-Saxon scholar, author of
a finely illustrated tl Memorials of Oxford." I
recall him as a feeble old gentleman, bent nearly

double, preserving and relating anecdotes, tradi-

223

224 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

tional and personal, of College heroes in the past
—of Tom Warton, Budgell, Lisle Bowles, Kett.
He succeeded stately Dr. Chapman, whose daughter,
my shrewd old neighbour in Holywell, surviving
her father more than half a century, with sixty
years of Oxford prattle at her fluent tongue's end,
was run over and killed by a cricketing brake in
the early sixties. Ingram was a Wykehamist, and
dined always at our New College Gaudy, invariably
in his after-dinner speech making modest allusion
to "my little work." Of his Fellows I remember
Guillemard, the non-placeting Proctor, along with
Church, of 1845; Copeland, earliest disciple and
latest friend of Newman ; Claughton, tutor to
young Lord Ward, whose sister he married, was
presented by him to the valuable living of Kidder-
minster, and became Bishop of Rochester. Lord
Ward, afterwards Lord Dudley, was conspicuous
by his beautiful face and long waving hair, which
the Paris ladies imitated on their own heads by
crimping-irons. He used to come to my father's
accompanied by an enormous dog, on which one
day he perched my brother, afterwards Dr. Tuck-
well, then, like the hero of " Boots at the Swan," a
"very little boy," and trotted him round the hall.
Amongst the Fellows too was Isaac Williams,
whose project of "Tracts for the Times," hatched
with Hurrell Froude under the trees in Trinity
Garden, brought Newman back from Italy and
began the Oxford Movement. Williams came up
from Harrow with the reputation of a finished
Latin scholar, and won the Latin Verse, "Ars
Geologica," in 1823. W. G. Cole used to relate

TRINITY 225

that, being Pro-proctor in this year, and keeping
one of the Theatre gates at Commemoration, he
was annoyed by the pertinacity of a stranger,
who insisted on taking the place by storm. Cole
gripped him, and asked his name. " My name is
Williams, sir ; my son has a Prize, and I want to
hear him recite his poem." Of course Cole passed
him in. Double honours were expected for Isaac ;
but his health broke down, and by Abernethy's
order he was contented with a Pass; recovering,
however, to obtain a Trinity Fellowship. He was,
under the signature f, one of the six writers in the
" Lyra Apostolica," and was the author also of
Tract 80, on " Reserve in Religious Teaching." I
well remember the exciting contest between him
and Garbett for the Poetry Professorship in 1841-2.
No one denied that he was the better man ; but an
unwise circular of Pusey's, provoking a dexterous
response from Gilbert, gave a theological character
to the election. The commotion spread far and
wide ; the London papers took it up, ranging
themselves on what was now first called the "Anti-
Tractarian " side. The silent but growing alarm
excited by the Tracts found expression in support
of Garbett, and a comparison of promised votes
showing Williams to be in the minority, he with-
drew, married soon after, and left Oxford. A story
was told of him later, for the correctness of which
I do not vouch. He had an unaccountable anti-
pathy to Jews, and resented the Hebrew Christian
name which his sponsors had inflicted on him ; his
children, at any rate, should bear homely modern
prcenomina, A son was born to him, John Keble

P

226 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

was its godfather, and it was baptized John Edward.
Nothing, he thought, could be more free from an
Israelite taint, though in the first name misgivings
might have lurked ; until, too late, he discovered
that the child's initials would be J. E. W. His
autobiography, published after his death, throws a
curious sidelight on Newman's character, not found
in any other notice of the " Movement." He was a
humble, self-distrusting, saintly being, cast in the
Keble, not the Newman, type. Of his numerous
works in prose and poetry it is likely that one alone
will survive, his "Gospel Narrative of our Lord's
Passion." In the "Cathedral," the "Christian
Scholar," above all in the " Baptistery," are strains
of genuine poetry, yet for the most part careless
in structure and lacking condensation ; but the
tenderness, scriptural insight, infusion with the
best patristic feeling, of the " Passion " seems to
me to leave far behind all other English devotional
commentaries.

"Monsignor" Patterson, who left us — absquatu-
lated, as Manuel Johnson used to say — with
Manning and others in the second Hegira, was a
man learned, genial, musical, and a charming talker.
I recall his enraptured face once in New College
chapel, when the choristers, at all times cantare
pares, were led by Miss Hawes, a London vocalist
who had come down for an Oxford concert, and
who, attending chapel, added her fine soprano to
the music. He used to give evening parties in his
rooms, to which his friends were warned to bring
only " men as can talk and men as can sing," so he
used to put it. Some years later I met him in

TRINITY 227

Dublin ; and was touched as I have often been
in company with Newman's fugitives, by his
pathetically eager recurrence, as of a homesick
exile, to Oxford memories and names and incidents.
I cannot myself, even now, without a pang recall
that ancient time. These men were for the most
part the flower of the Anglican as of the Oxford
flock; none can estimate their loss to the University,
to the Church, to the community ; and, through
the consequent narrowing of their careers, to them-
selves. Men of piety, intellect, note, remained ;
but the heart had gone out of the Movement ; it
declined, as Liddon used sadly to acknowledge
and bewail, from aspirations to observances : its
beneficent constructive side, its exuberant energy,
unworldly mysticism, studious enthusiasm, leisured
erudition, passionate self-devotion, passed into
channels not shaped and not available for their
distribution. In religion as in politics, the pos-
session of commanding influence is a fearful gift.
" Bad men," says a great satirist, " are bad, do the
bad, go to the bad ; but who shall measure the
abiding mischief which a very good man can do ? "
Residents at Oxford in the later Forties were
frequently aware of a very good-looking junior Don
taking his walks abroad with young Lord Robert
Cecil, Lord Lothian, his brother Schomberg, and
others of ihejeunesse surdoree} who apparently looked
up to him as guide, philosopher, and friend. It was
Frederick Meyrick, a lately elected Fellow of Trinity.
We thought that a man starting with qualifica-
tions so marked, academic, social, personal, must
become a shining University light : but he married,

228 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

became a School Inspector, for a time disappeared,
then suddenly came into notice during the horrida
bella between Newman and Charles Kingsley, as
author of a pamphlet bearing the cumbrous title
— "But isn't Kingsley right after all ?" It was a
rather vigorous production, touching with an
Ithuriel spear of common sense Newman's dex-
terous subterfuge and Kingsley's bungling in-
competence ; and it won Gladstone's admiring
approbation. It had no effect upon the public
mind ; men could not all appreciate reasoning ;
they could all enjoy the "Apologia" to which the
controversy gave rise. Kingsley was entirely dis-
credited, and for several years the sale of his books

fell off.

Exchanging his School Inspectorship for a living,
Meyrick devoted himself to theological controversy.
More than fifty pamphlets stand against his name
in the British Museum Catalogue : he contributed
also to countless " religious " Journals, and edited
seventeenth century Treatises. A wide traveller,
an accomplished linguist, a practised disputant, he
wrote on the Church of Spain, on the morality of
Liguori, on Italian clerical legends, on Vaticanism,
on Irish Church Missions. He was a friend and
supporter of Dollinger, a vehement opponent of
Manning, of Huxley, of Pattison, of Jowett.

How could such a man escape promotion ? His
youthful friend, afterwards Lord Salisbury, quar-
relled with him when in 1865 he voted for Gladstone
at Oxford, and his displeasure was possibly perma-
nent. But what was Gladstone about, in his numerous
Episcopal creations, to pass over a man so like-

TRINITY 129

minded, so active, and above all so safe ? Perhaps
it was as well for Meyrick : endowment with mitral
consequence might not have compensated for de-
terioration of moral fibre : anyhow, he remained
Vicar of Blickling till his death. Dignified, learned,
pious, with high College honours and good social
position, he preserved the old type of humanistic
University training in the past. Intransigent in
youth, and sturdy to the end, he remained through
life a faithful champion of lost and losing causes.
Respecting his fidelity to convictions which he had
not idly formed, we appreciate him as type of a class
essential probably to the progressive development
of its time, extinct and perhaps impossible to-day.

But the prominent representive of Trinity irH
those days was its Vice- President, " Tommy " Short,
who had been College Tutor when the century was
in its teens, and was to continue lecturing into the
late Sixties. He knew his books by heart, expound-
ing them with fluency and humour ; he ranked
with the best Oxford whist-players, and kept a
spacious cellar of old port wine, including, I re-
member, a pipe which he had bought from a
Dissenting wine merchant, and labelled " Schismatic
Binn." But he was especially notable as a con-
versationalist, the last, perhaps, to represent the
colloquial felicities which constituted a fine art in
Oxford once, and are to-day recalled sadly as a lost
art by superannuates like myself. Talk such as his
can hardly be reproduced ; unforced, condensed,
epigrammatic, crisp, yet at the same time voluble, it
becomes vapid when severed from its a propos,
loses point unless verbally repeated ; lacks above all *'

230 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

the twinkling eye and incisive nasal tones of its
^originator. Yet some of his sayings I remember,
and his friend Dr. Plutnmer has kindly furnished
me with not a few besides. Once, when I breakfasted
in his rooms with Walter Thursby, known after-
wards as the first Englishman to reach the summit
of Mount Ararat, he told us that, examining in the
Schools the day before, he had asked what mention
is made of Marriage in the Articles ; to which the
scholar "answered briskly, that it is a fond thing
vainly invented, without any warrant either in
antiquity or Scripture." This scaling of Ararat, by-
the-bye, attracted much attention at the time.
Thursby, who had just taken his degree, was travel-
ling with another Trinity man, "white" Theobald
he was called ; and though not practised climbers,
they successfully assailed the biblical height. They
found the snow in favourable condition, and the
infames scopulos undeserving of their bad repute ;
but the marauding tribes haunting the hillside
rendered necessary a guard of Kurdish soldiers.
" I understand," said Arthur Ridding, when in New
College Common Room they told the story of their
exploit ; " I understand, you took some Curds with
you to show the whey."

I return to dear old Short. Cole of Worcester —
" Papirius Carbo," Short always called him — went
to Short before taking his degree to read aloud the
Articles, as was then customary. While he read,
Short moved about apparently unheeding, arranged
papers and gave instructions to his scout. But he
was not inattentive ; when Cole read from the
Article on the Old Testament about the "com-

TRINITY 231

mandments which are called moral," Short stopped
him to inquire which were the commandments
called immoral. He held together with his Fellow-
ship the cure of St. Nicholas, Abingdon. Sanday of
Trinity took the duty one day, and came to him for
instructions. Said Short, " I feed my flock with hay
and straw (prayers and sermon) in the morning,
hay only in the afternoon." He used to dine and
play a rubber at a house near Oxford. He sat next
to a learned lady, whom he knew to be well on the
further side of fifty. " Pray, Mr. Short," she said,
" when does the human mind reach maturity ? " He
answered, " Aristotle says, at forty-nine ; and what
a blue you will be when you reach that age."
Arriving late at the same house, he learned that the
famous preacher Hugh M'Neile had unexpectedly
come upon a visit, and that whist was to be sup-
planted by a Scripture reading and exposition.
Very cross, he sat to endure. Boanerges read a
passage from the Acts: "They knew that the

island was called Mellta." "The d they did!"

was heard from Short's corner. Dining at another
hospitable house, he became sleepy, and let the
decanters pass. " Mr. Short," his host remon-
strated, " that is Comet Port." [The Comet year,
1811, yielded the finest vintage of the century.]
" Oh, is it ? then, comitatis causa, I will take a
glass." When Goulburn, Head Master of Rugby,
was expecting the deanery of Exeter, Otter of
Corpus naughtily proposed to insert his biography
in The Times, specifying the number of boys he
found at the school, and the loss which his reign
had caused. " No," said Short, " that would not be

232 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

biography, but boyography." Himself a Master at
Rugby under Dr. Wooll, Arnold's predecessor, he
was asked by Lord Lyttelton, Rugbean and a Trustee,
to furnish a motto for the flogging school. " Great
cry and little Wooll/' was the answer : Wooll was
a diminutive man. Short used to say that at
Rugby and at Oxford he had been concerned with
more than a thousand pupils ; and that for every
one foolish boy he had found two foolish parents.
The school physician of his time, a Dr. Bucknill,
known as " Hip-Hip Bucknill," was a Character.
A boy was ill, and to Rugby came the mother in
alarm. "Doctor, is there any danger ?" " There
is always danger when there is illness." "But can
you do anything for him ? " "I can't say, Take up
your bed and walk." " No, but, Doctor, do tell me
how he really is; my husband is so very anxious that
I should return to him." if So should I be, madam,
were I your husband."

"Tommy" Sheppard of Exeter used to ride

with Miss Susan . Near Godstow one day

his horse jibbed and threw him into the water.
While the lady sat in her saddle and laughed at
his struggles to scramble out, Short passed by.
He stopped, and said, "This time the elder is in
the water, and Susanna is looking at him." When
in his younger days the College living of Oddington
fell, Miss Lee, the President's daughter, asked him
whether he meant to take it. " Will you go with
me?" "No." "Then I shall not take it; but
you can't say you never had an offer." When
eleven years later Rotherfield Grays was vacant,
the lady gave him, and herself, another chance, by

TRINITY 233

repeating the former question. " No," said Short,
"as you wouldn't go with me to Oddington, I
sha'n't go without you to Rotherfield Grays."
Suffering from what Horace calls tumults in the
stomach, he went to consult Jephson at Leam-
ington. "Your colon is out of order." "So I
guessed, but I want you to prevent it from coming
to a full stop." Some one remarked that the child
of two unusually ugly parents was a very pretty
baby. " Then," said Short, " it must be a bastard
on both sides." A scout was dismissed for inso-
lence : he came to Short. " I never thought, Mr.
Short, that you would take the bread out of a poor
man's mouth." " I take the bread out of your
louth ? why, you fool, you spat it out." When
Plumptre became Vice-Chancellor in 1848, Short
stopped him in the street. " Now, Master, you
will have to sport a cassock. Make use of the
opportunity to wear out your old pairs of black
trousers." His own were sometimes shrunken.
Crossing the Quad, he overheard two undergra-
duates commenting on "the brevity of Tommy's
trousers." " Yes, you young jackanapes, Tommy's
trousers are like you, they want taking down and
strapping." He rebuked a youngster for smoking
a regalia in the High Street. "Please, Mr. Short,
how did you know it was a regalia ? " " Young
man, it is the business of a Tutor to know all
wickedness and practise none." A Trinity Scholar
who got only a Second Class wrote to Short that
he feared it was his duty to resign his Scholarship.

" Take my compliments to Mr. ," Short said

to his scout, "and tell him that if he comes

234 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

into chapel without a surplice I shall fine him a
pound." Only Fellows and Scholars wore sur-
plices. Another repartee is somewhat grim, but
too characteristic to be omitted. An under-
graduate had debauched a girl in humble life,
was penitent, wished to marry her, and with
singularly bad judgment consulted Short.

" Cato's a proper person to entrust
A love-tale with ; "

" if you marry her," said his oracle, " you are a
fool ; if you don't marry her, you are a black-
guard ; in either case you will cease to be a
member of this College."

Short had a horror of fasting, as ruinous to
health. " I remember not many years ago when
there were eighteen Tractarian undergraduates in
this College. I threw not only cold water, but
dirty water, on their ascetic practices, and they
mostly discontinued them." And he used to tell
how Newman's failure in the Schools was due to
an idea he had taken up, that the more he re-
duced his body the better his mind would work.
He went in half-starved, and broke down right
and left. He had not even read the Third Book of
Aldrich, and knew next to nothing of the ALneid,
while his Mathematical Papers, Ben Symons told
Short, were scrawled over unintelligibly ; one pro-
blem, however, being worked out with remarkable
ingenuity. The marvel was that the examiners
passed him at all ; they placed him as low as
they could, in the Second Division of the Second
Class, " under the line," as it was then contemptu-

TRINITY 235

ously called. " My nerves forsook me, and I
failed," was his own account of the disaster in
writing home. It was a severe blow to his Oxford *
friends, who had calculated with certainty on his
obtaining the highest honours ; and they were
hardly less startled when only a year afterwards
he stood for an Oriel Fellowship, at that time
the blue ribbon of University distinction. The
moment was singularly unpropitious ; in the pre-
ceding year Oriel, which prided itself on electing
its Fellows according to their prowess and promise
in the examination rather than by their previous
exploits in the Schools, had chosen a Second Class
man, C. J. Plumer, over the head of a First Class
man, George Howard, afterwards Lord Morpeth ;
and had been savagely attacked in the Edinburgh
Review (by the unsuccessful candidate, as Cople-
ston discovered) for preferring mediocrity to excel-
lence. Copleston and his Fellows could afford to
ignore the censure, yet it must tend to make them
wary ; and their selection of a man whose failure
was notorious and recent might seem to justify*
the vilipendings of the Edinburgh. Short, how-
ever, who knew what was in his pupil, pressed
Newman to stand ; he might not succeed, but he
would show his power, and retrieve the last year's
collapse. Thus fortified, Newman offered himself.
"He came to me," Short said, "after the first
paper, which was an Essay, and said that he had
made of it a complete mess — had broken down
entirely. Now I had just seen Tyler, one of the
Fellows, who said, ' Tell me something about your
man Newman ; his is by far the best Essay we

236 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

have had.' Of course I did not tell this to New-
man, but I said to him, ' You go on with the exa-
mination, and work through as if you had no
chance and were only an unconcerned spec-
tator.' ' Short was lunching at the time, and,
like the judicious angel visitant to Elijah, made
his emaciated pupil eat and drink — " Arise and
eat, for the journey is too long for thee" — send-
ing him away strengthened in mind as well as
body by a plentiful and savoury meal. It was
an object of great importance to Newman at that
time to obtain a Fellowship, for his father, a
brewer at Alton, had failed. While the examina-
tion was proceeding, Short had occasion to call
on Copleston, and took the opportunity of telling
him that Newman was a highly deserving man,
and that the circumstances of his family were
such as to make a Fellowship very desirable.
The Provost thanked him for the information,
saying that such considerations were not alto-
gether without weight in their elections. On the
next day Short went into the country ; riding
back to Oxford soon afterwards, he stopped at
Shipstone to bait his horse, and taking up an
Oxford paper read, " Yesterday Mr. John Henry
Newman of Trinity College was elected Fellow of
Oriel." When asked about his old pupil in later
days, he used to say, " Newman was a very
amenable fellow ; he did jib occasionally, but we
all liked him very much. He was a wonderful
divine in his undergraduate days. I can remember
his bringing the Book of Psalms into Collections,
and when we asked him to name the prophetical

TRINITY 237

psalms, he started with the second, and went
through them all. Oh dear ! he used to run you
down with his answers. He played the violin,
too, very well, and often took a part in quartetts
at President Lee's musical parties." Short himself
was musical. I recall him one evening in Dr.
Bliss's drawing-room, to which he came attired in
black pantaloons, grey silk stockings, and silver-
buckled shoes, sitting cross-legged at the feet of
Mrs. Wingfield, an accomplished pianist, and re-
proaching her because she played only modern
music. The lady pleaded that the age was tired
of the old music. " Correct the age," he answered
in his nasal tones, and his friend, moving to the
piano, played for him a fine piece by Scarlatti.

Once only after Newman's secession he and
Short met, when the Cardinal visited Oxford in
1878, and dined at Trinity high table on February
27. Short was too feeble to go into Hall, but
Newman went to his rooms. " I asked him
whether he remembered lunching with me during
the Oriel Examination. 'Yes,' he said, 'and I
remember what you had for luncheon ; it was lamb
cutlets and fried parsley.' ' This pleased Short
much, and the two agreed that Short had in-
fluenced Newman's life more than any man ; since,
but for Short, Newman would have retired from
the examination, while success in that formed the
foundation of his whole career. Until his own
death Newman said a mass for Short every year.

A touch of soberness falls upon the old Vice-
President's closing days. He became blind to-
wards the end, and was led about the streets.

238 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Returning once to Oxford after years of absence,
and meeting him in the Turl, I stopped him.
" My father's son must shake you by the hand."
« Who is it?" "Tuckwell." "Which of them?"
"The eldest." "Oh yes, the Master of Taunton
school. Well, now, remember that what TroXvirpay-
is to men of business, that is 770X^X07-
to a schoolmaster." I thought of a printer's
error which made Moberly miserable in a pub-
lished sermon preached by him at St. Mary's just
before going to Winchester, whereby the sentence,
<<We must revive our flagging energies," became,
rather too appropriately, "We must revive our
flogging energies." T. L. Claughton used to relate
that after becoming Bishop of Rochester he met
Short one day at the President's. After dinner the
two strolled in the garden, and as soon as they were
screened from the windows Short went down on
his knees, and said, " Claughton, give me your
blessing." " I was very much moved," said
Claughton, telling the story afterwards to Dr.
Plummer. To the same old friend Short said once,
"College rooms are very good to live in, but very
bad to die in." He died, not in College, but some-
where near Birmingham, in 1879. Deus sit pro-
pitius huic potatori !

CHAPTER XIV

CORPUS

" The Pelican kindly for her tender brood
Tears her own bowels^ trilleth out her blood
To heal her young: and in a wondrous sort
Unto her children doth her life disport.
A type of Christ, who, sin-thralled man to free,
Became a captive, and on shamefiil Tree
Self-guiltless shed his blood, by*s wounds to save ust
And heal the wounds th? old serpent firstly gave us.
And so became of meer immortal mortal
Thereby to make frail mortal man immortal"

— SYLVESTER'S Du Bartas.

Bridges — Greswell — Otter — Hext — Coxe — Vaughan Thomas —
Blackstone — Furneaux — Tom Faussett.

OF two Corpus men, amusing lunatics both, Frowd
and Holme, I made mention on page 27 ; but my
memory, stimulated by an old friend, Professor
H. A. Strong, himself in former days a Scholar, has
brought before me a further file of worthies from the
College of the Pelican.

I remember old President Bridges ; his little
daughter was my playfellow. Bridges, the Fellow
of Corpus, was his nephew. He was a Wykehamist,
and had left behind him amongst the Juniors a rather
awful memory. He was a keen cricketer, and used
to question me about the College and Commoner
matches. He gave me the original MS. scores of the

first matches played at Lords between Winchester

239

24o REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

and Harrow. I presented them to T. W. Erie,
afterwards Associate in Common Pleas. Bridges —
Bridger the boys called him — went to the Bar, and
became Attorney General at Hong-Kong. He was
very deeply marked with small-pox : when news
reached us of his marriage, Arthur Ridding re-
marked that the lady ought to be pitied.

When Dr. Bridges died, the Headship was offered
to Greswell. Tommy Greswell he was called : his
name was Edward, but the men had re-christened
him, as the children re-christened the pig in "The
Golden Age." He was a walking library of re-
condite classics ; Macmullen in one generation,
Furneaux in another, used to draw him out.
Once in his life he was recorded to have made a
joke. There was a Gentleman Commoner named
Meiklam. Called on by the President at Col-
lections, where it was certain that he would do his
Tutors no credit, Greswell said — " Please, Mr.
President, leave him to us — Nos humilem feriemus
agnam ; We will smite the meek lamb." On his
refusal of the Headship Norris was elected Pre-
sident, "a little round fat oily man of God," who
kept hunters. Nimrod, in his "Condition of
Hunters," mentions the high condition in which
Norris' horses were kept. He used to dine with
us at New College sometimes, when special
Caecuban was brought out from the College cellars.
On becoming President he gave up hunting and
sold his horses ; his groom came into Quad sob-
bing out — " I never thought to live to see my
master made into an old woman."

Francis Otter, one of the Fellows, who sat for

CORPUS 241

the Louth Division of Lincolnshire during the
Short Parliament, and who married the sister of
George Eliot's husband, Mr. Gross, once asked
him, as Burgon asked Routh, for a word of wisdom
which might be to him a maxim and a guide in the
change and chance of life. " I will give you two
such, my young friend," said Norris. " First, never
make an enemy ; and secondly — never be drawn
into a correspondence."

Otter was famous during the Secession War for
his advocacy of the North. It used to be said then
that the North had only three champions in Eng-
land, Queen Victoria, the Duke of Argyle, and the
Spectator newspaper. Otter made a fourth. The
Spectator was so unpopular for its advocacy that
it lost nearly all its subscribers, but the circulation
more than recovered itself after the war. Otter
took the chair at a great meeting where I spoke
for him at Sleaford in 1890. He talked about the
Roman Empire, and never touched his audience.
I heard an important land-agent say, "We don't
want a d — d Tutor to represent us."

The bestknown Corpus Tutor of my time was Hext.
From a letter which he wrote to me when my book
came out, mentioning him as it did in connection
with Dr. Frowd, I transcribe the biographical part: —
" . . . the pleasure you have given me in reviving
so many of my reminiscences, which with age are
beginning to escape me. In 1836 I got a Scholar-
ship at Corpus, resided till 1858, and then for thirty
years never I believe missed a year to look up old
friends for a few days. Alas ! they are getting
scarce now. ... I treasured Lord Exmouth's port

242 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

wine as Frowd had done, never using it but when
old Oxford friends came to visit me, opening the
last bottle for Evans of Pembroke in 1873. My
last visit to Oxford was I think in 1897, to an 'old
Corpus ' dinner, when I stayed with Furneaux, and
met a grand gathering of old friends, most of whom
I had not seen for forty or fifty years. I fear I
shall never see Oxford again. In 1896 I con-
tributed an article to the Pelican Record, on
' Memories of Corpus boating/ in which I gave an
account of the seven-oar race, much like your own.
Two of the crew, George Hughes and Mackay,
were pupils of mine at the time.

" My dearest friend of all time was Harry Coxe.
I gave Burgon a few lines about him for his twelve
good men. I don't think I have any old friends sur-
viving in Oxford except Chase. I see William Ogle
occasionally in London. The rest I think are gone.

" I am now retired ; gave up my Corpus Living
in 1899, and am at last feeling my age. Once more
thank you for your Reminiscences : I remember
your father well, but I never knew you I'm afraid."

He knew me across the examination table in the
Schools. I remember him examining me in the
Ethics for Greats in 1852. I knew it " in parts " — I
forbear the obvious quotation — and Karslake of
Merton my Tutor had imparted to me a variety of
dodges by which an Examiner testing one in a
weak place might be diverted on to stronger
ground. Karslake came in to hear my Viva Voce;
and on my adroitly and successfully practising
his lesson, laughed audibly, and made me smile.
Little Hext glared suspiciously ; and I was obliged

CORPUS 243

to look serious, a feat which I achieved without
difficulty on his asking me a question which I
could not answer. He next took me in Horace ;
set me on, as I thought, in Satire IX., and I glee-
fully turned to the Ibam forte. He corrected me
again suspiciously : " I asked for the 9th Epistle.1'
But I knew by heart Steele's fine translation of the
Septimius missive in the Spectator, and restored
him to good humour. His letter was written in
1901, when he was eighty-six years old. He died
in the same year.

His friend Henry Coxe was Chaplain at Corpus
in those days ; famous for the pace at which he
took the prayers : in amusing contrast to the slow
measured reading of President Norris. He was
the best mimic I ever met. I once wanted to see
Dr. Wolff, the Bokhara missionary and savant ;
sought him in the Bodleian, and asked Coxe if he
was there. Instantly Coxe's handsome face was
distorted into Wolff's grotesque phiz, his fingers
wreathed themselves in strange twitchings, and
Wolff's cavernous voice ascended from his chest.
At that moment Wolff himself emerged from one
of the cells ; gesticulations, face, voice, so exactly
as Coxe had rendered them, that I was fain to
turn away. He used to render dialogues between
old Routh and Burgon ; Burgon's piping voice
and gushing manner set off by the old President's
sedate, soft, measured, half querulous, half sar-
castic tones.

Another notable Corpus Chaplain, formerly a
Fellow, was Vaughan Thomas, tall, white-haired,
red-faced, with sonorous voice. He was the last

244 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

survivor amongst the men to whom Latin was
a mother tongue, pouring forth orations voluble
and unprepared. He had been an active Uni-
versity politican ; but through some offence given
had taken his name off the books. He led the
original " Hampden row," as it was called. The
protesters against Hampden met in his rooms,
and he delivered a fine Latin speech on the
historic occasion when the Proctors non-placeted
the decree against the Bampton Lectures. His
wife was a Miss Williams, daughter to the Botanical
professor, who lived in the house overlooking
the Gardens at the High Street end of Rose
Lane. He lived in Holywell Lodge ; but when
his wife's sister died, moved into the vacated
house. Miss Williams was a character. She in-
habited on Sundays an unusually large pew in
St. Peter's, which she would allow no one to
share. Once, when some preacher drew a crowd,
she came late to find her pew filled with under-
graduates. I saw her stand at the door and motion
them all out, then shut herself in. Vaughan Thomas
used a large, old-fashioned, closed carriage, with a
handsome pair of horses, in which he and his
second wife "took the air" every day. But he
was a strict observer of "the Sabbath," and on
Sundays left his horses and coachman to their
rest, driving to his small living near Oxford in
one of May's two-horse flys.

I well knew poor Charles Blackstone. His
father held the New College living of Heckfield,
and was an intimate friend of Dr. Arnold. He
made a figure at the Union, speaking frequently,

CORPUS 245

and giving much time to the preparation of his
speeches. He won the Newdigate in 1848 — the sub-
ject "Columbus," reciting his poem in the Theatre
with great force amid loud applause. He was
found by his scout one morning lying dead upon
his sofa, a discharged pistol in his hand. The
conjecture offered at the inquest, and accepted,
was to the effect that he had been annoyed by
a rat in his room, and had bought the pistol
with intent to shoot it : had fallen asleep on his
sofa overnight, and, waked by the rat, had some-
how entangled the pistol in his dress and lodged
the contents in himself.

I come to Henry Furneaux, with whom I was
intimate for nearly sixty years. We were juniors
together at Winchester in 1842. He was then
a very tiny boy, with a large head which used
to hang on one side, and great round eyes like
those with wrhich a hare gazes at you when you
surprise it sitting in its form. He made fun of
his diminutive stature, declaring that in a shower
he could walk between the drops of rain and not
get wet. His astonishing memory first showed
itself in the summer of 1844, when he performed
in " Standing Up," as it was called, the feat which
I have elsewhere commemorated. Later, in the
Sixth Form, it was customary in the weekly
Horace lesson to construe the whole or part of
a Satire or Epistle, then to say by heart what
we had translated the week before. One day,
our lesson opened at the Non quia Mczcenas,
which we duly construed, and were prepared to
say by heart the Brundusium diary which pre-

246 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

cedes it. By mistake Moberly set Furneaux on
at the piece just construed, which none of us
had learned. He went merrily ahead, till Moberly,
noting our amused remonstrant faces, saw his
mistake, and stopped the performance, adding to
Furneaux, after a pause, a few serious words as
to the responsibility attaching to his remarkable
talent. His forte at that time was original Latin
Prose. Many of us were fluent Latinists, but he
beat us all. Once a month or so we had to
produce a Latin critique on some great classical
work of poet, orator, historian : it must occupy
twelve pages of a quarto manuscript book. But
to our hardness of heart was accorded a blank
margin, which lazy boys would sometimes extend
till the composition was reduced to a series of
slender strips. Furneaux, alone of us all, never
deigned to employ any margin ; his twelve pages
were all covered with black manuscript. His Latin
Verse was not particularly good ; his English Verse
execrable : I remember a poem which he wrote on
Gothic Architecture, and which his co-mates cri-
ticised so mercilessly that in a passion of tears he
tore it up. I myself, in satira nimis acer, com-
posed on the occasion a wicked lampoon : but he
bore me no spite ; malice was not in his nature.
Senior of the School, he fortunately did not
go off to New College, the only two vacancies
being annexed, according to the vicious practice
of that day, by two Founders' kin much his
juniors. I say fortunately ; for at that time New
College absorbed the cream of Winchester and
converted it into thinnest milk. He got his

CORPUS 247

Corpus Scholarship, his First Class, his Fellow-
ship. It was as an undergraduate that he first
showed his genius for story telling. He picked
up and remembered every jeu d' esprit emitted by
Thorold Rogers, Blaydes, Bartlett, Tom Faussett,
and would retail them with contagious enjoyment
of their fun. These passed away from him mostly
in after life, until his memory was stirred ; then
they all came back. In writing my Oxford book
I once or twice applied to him to complete
some squib of which I remembered only a line
or two ; and with some effort he usually suc-
ceeded. "You certainly are," he wrote to me,
" a wonderful person for stimulating my recol-
lection. The verses you want must have slum-
bered in my memory for I know not how many
years. In late years I have not heard of any
good thing. I fear the art is extinct, the clever
men being too serious, the others too stupid."
The most wonderful of his stories was known as
"The Cornish Jury." In a case of murder the
jury had retired to consider their verdict; and
at first beguiled the time with general talk, which
Furneaux, a born Cornishman, rendered in the
native dialect. Reminded at last by the Foreman
that they must "come to a 'cision on this here
case," the dikasts delivered their judgments in-
dividually, each more amazing than his predeces-
sors. I can recall them, but it would be useless
to transcribe them :

"Nam quamvis memori referao mihi pectore cuncta,
Non ta g en interpres tantundem juveris ; adde
Vultum habitumque hominis."

248 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Mansel once tried to tell the story in my hearing ;
he was a professed raconteur, but he murdered it
dismally.

Furneaux was for some years a School Exa-
miner, but disliked the pressure which the task
involved. " They bring you a haystack of Papers
at 6 P.M. and expect the marks next morning."
And, though a strenuous worker, he loved a
leisurely dinner and a good night's rest. He
abandoned the practice after a while : it had
been, he said, "a youthful folly." He died in
1900, in his seventy-first year.

One old acquaintance more shall close my
list, who, like the last, died, multis flebilis, before
his time, Tom Faussett of Corpus. He held a
close scholarship, confined to the county of Ox-
ford. There was only one candidate besides, but
as the senior boy at Winchester he was formid-
able. I remember Faussett's glee when his rival
withdrew, preferring unwisely to take his chance
of New College. Unwisely — because while New
College was decadent, Corpus was a rising College.
While at College Faussett was dexterous in epi-
gram and parody ; he became afterwards an ex-
ceptionally skilful writer of Latin poetry ; not the
classical poetry of Lord Wellesley and Charles
Wordsworth, but the riming mediaeval verse, now
secular and humorous, now devotional, of Walter
de Mapes or of the Paris Breviary. He was an
unrivalled punster : his was the quatrain in Punch
at which all England laughed, when in the Ashantee
war King Coffee Calcalli fled from his burning
capital —

CORPUS 249

" Coomassie's town is burnt to dust,

The King, escaped is he :

So Ash-and-Coffee now remain

Of what was Ash-an-tee."

It is not so easy to pun in Latin ; but that too
he habitually achieved. In some lines sent to
Dean Alford at a time when stormy winds did
blow he interjects the comment —

" Contra venti sunt brumales
(Audin' quanta vox eis ? ),
Si non cequinoctiales
Saltern czque noxii"

An accomplished lawyer and antiquary, he lived
and died at Canterbury as Auditor to the Dean
and Chapter; died at the early age of forty-eight.
While he was an undergraduate, I had heard
some one recite from a topical imitation of Gray's
" Elegy/' which he ascribed to Faussett. The
lines kept a hold on me, and ten years afterwards,
meeting him in Oxford, I asked him for them.
" I don't think a copy is extant," he said with
astonishment. " I never even knew that F. had
heard of them ; but that they should have reached
you and remained in your memory is to me
wonderful." He recalled and sent me the lines ;
I reproduce them from his handwriting. It was
a letter, written to an absentee comrade at the
close of term.

" Collections o'er — the knell of closing term,

The lower herd speed off with eager glee,
The Dons too homeward trail their steps sedate,
And leave the College to the scouts and me.

250 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Now fades the last portmanteau on my view,
And o'er the Quad a solemn stillness looms ;

Save where young Furneaux coaching still resides,
And mumbling pupils throng his distant rooms :

Save that from yonder gloom-encircled lodge,
The porter's boy doth to the porter moan

Of such as issuing from the ancient gate
Forget the usual terminal half-crown.

Within that number two, that one pair left,

Where heaves the wall with countless gold-framed views,

All in his snug armchair in silence set,

Your humble correspondent takes his snooze.

The husky voice of dream-dissolving scout,
The porter, summoning to the Dean's stern frown,

The bell's shrill tocsin and the echoing clock
No more disturb him from his morning's down.

For him no more the social breakfast waits,
Nor smiling Sankey boils the midnight brew,

No mirthful Wadham scatters cheer around,
No Blaydes applauds the long-divided crew.

Oft did blue devils 'neath their influence fly,
Their laughter oft his stubborn moods dispelled,

How jovial did they chaff the term away,

How the Quad echoed as their sides they held !

Ah ! let not Christchurch mock their simple life,
Their homelier joys and less expensive cares,

Nor Merton gaze with a disdainful smile
On fun too intellectual to be theirs.

The glare of bran new pinks, the pomp of teams,
The tuft-hunter's success, the gambler's luck,

Alike upon a slippery basis stand ;

A course too rapid endeth in a " muck."

CORPUS 251

Nor you, ye swells, impute to us a fault
In fame and memory if to you we yield,

If ours no vulpine brush, no argent vase,
Proclaim as victors of the flood and field.

Can storied urns or animated " busts " ]
Bribe back the mucker which has once been run ;

Can knocker wrenched allay proctorial ire,
Or tails of vermin soothe a clamorous dun ?

Yet know, in this our quiet spot have lived

Hearts close united by affection's tie,
Wit that might shine in Courts as well as Quads,

And social virtues with which few can vie.

Their names, their deeds, writ in tradition's page,
Shall sound eternised by her Muse's lyre,

Freshmen to come the fond record shall trace,

Rejoice in youth, like them, like them in age aspire."

1 Bust— slang for a breakdown in character and career,
synonymous with "mucker," then first coming into use.

CHAPTER XV

PATTISON, MAURICE, THOMSON, GOULBURN
WILLIAM SEWELL

" Hast thou seen higher, holier things than these,
And therefore must to these refuse thy heart?
With the true Best, alack, how ill agrees

That best that thou ivouldst choose.
The Summum Pulchrum rests in heaven above ;

Do thou as best thou may'st, thy duty do :
Amid the things allowed thee live and love :
Same day thou shalt it view.""

— CLOUGH.

A Contrast to Jowett — Mark Pattison's Character land Career — A
Sceptic — And a Cynic — Omni-erudition — His Talk of Books —
The Optimist and the Pessimist — Maurice — Archbishop Thomson
— Provost of Queen's — Oxford Preachers — Early Recollections —
Denison — Hamilton — Adams — Goulburn — Goulburn at Rugby —
A Mediaeval Saint — Dean of Norwich — William Sewell — More
Puseyite than Pusey — His Emotional Theology — His Quaint Lec-
tures— His Translation of Horace — An Epidemic of High Church
Novelettes— " Amy Herbert " — " Hawkstone" — St. Columba's
College — Singleton — Radley.

THERE remain some viri illustres whom I knew,
and of whom I have words to say. First of these
comes Mark Pattison. To bracket him with Jowett,
as is often done, shows superficial knowledge of
the pair. Both, no doubt, were clergymen, both
missed disappointingly and afterwards exultingly
obtained the Headship of their Colleges, both
wrote in " Essays and Reviews." Behind these

accidents are life equipment, experiences, char-

252

MARK PATTISON

From a Portrait in the possession of Miss Stirke

ar.tf rs

PATTISON AND OTHERS 253

acters, temperaments, standing in phenomenal
contrast. Pattison's mind was the more com-
prehensive, instructed, idealistic, its evolution as
intermittent and self-torturing as Jowett's was con-
tinuous and tranquil. Pattison's life, in its abrupt
precipitations and untoward straits, resembled the
mountain brook of Wordsworth's Solitary ; Jowett's
floated even, strong, and full, from the winning
of the Balliol scholarship by the little white-haired
lad with shrill voice and cherub face, until the
Sunday afternoon at Headley Park, when the old
man, shrill, white-haired, and cherubic still, bade
" farewell to the College," turned his face to the
wall, and died.

To a College whose tutors were inefficient and
its scholars healthy animals Pattison carried at
eighteen years old a mass of undigested reading,
an intelligence half awakened, a morbid self-con-
sciousness, a total want of the propriety and tact
which a public school instils, but in which home
training usually fails. Slowly there dawned in him
the idea of intellectual life, the desire to amass
learning for the rapture of acquiring it ; and to his
mental development, with all its aberrations, this
idea gave lasting unity. It was broken for a time
by Newman's influence, which swept him into the
Tractarian whirlpool, arrested the growth of his
understanding, diverted him from scholarahip to
theology ; the reaction which followed Newman's
flight told on him with corresponding force. He
had missed his First Class through going prema-
turely into the Schools, and taking in fewer books
than were required for the highest honours. The

254 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Examiners had doomed him to a Third, when one
of them, Hayward Cox, drew attention to his
answers in the Logic and Moral Science Papers,
which were gems of thought ; and prevailed on
his colleagues to place him in the Second Class.
He became Fellow of Lincoln, College Tutor and
Examiner in the Schools, threw himself zealously
into academic discipline and teaching, recovered
the bodily health which High Church aw^a-nKj]
<yv/j,vacria had impaired; was useful and ambitious
and happy. The Headship of Lincoln fell vacant,
and all looked to see him fill it — all except a torpid
and obstructive minority amongst the Fellows,
affronted by the energy which put their somnolence
to shame. Their intrigues succeeded, and he was
defeated by Thompson, a man well acquainted
with the College estates and business, but not
comparable with Pattison in intellectual and teach-
ing power. The disappointment paralysed him,
and, broken-hearted, he resigned his Tutorship.
Somewhat restored by two years of rambling,
fishing, foreign travel, but an altered and embit-
tered man, vindictive, melancholy, taciturn, he
fell back on his old ideal of life — the life of a
student pure and simple, with no view to literary
success, but, as before, for the joy which study
brings. Thenceforth for thirty years, with one
brief interruption, his life flowed in this single
channel. He lived among his books, used his
Headship, when it came to him, less in the interests
of the College than to enlarge his library and his
leisure; produced his monumental "Casaubon,"
outcome of twenty-five years' reading; flung off

PATTISON AND OTHERS 255

from his workshop the chips now mortised into
his collected Essays ; died, multa gemens, as for
his reft library, so most of all for this, that his
"Life of Scaliger," conceived and shaped in
memory and notes, must pass with him into the
land where all things are forgotten.

Such a life must needs write wrinkles, not only on
cheek and brow, but on heart and brain : it left its
mark on Pattison's. It left him sceptic. Puritanism,
Anglicanism, Catholicism, had successively widened
his religious conceptions, each in turn falling from
him like a worn-out garment, till he became Pantheist
on the positive side, negatively Agnostic. Religion
he esteemed as a good servant but a bad master ;
the idea of Deity, he told one of his querists, was
"defaecated to a pure transparency." Faith he
defined as ft belief in the unproved " ; and what he
could not prove, that he would not believe. This
discrepancy between esoteric conviction and pro-
fessional status troubled him not at all. He acknow-
ledged to Thorold Rogers, who had abandoned
the Anglican ministry, his own disbelief in what
those who hold them call the fundamental verities
of Christianity ; but said that as a young man he
had adopted in good faith the doctrines of the
English Church, had shaped his life to meet its
demands, was too old now to make a change injuri-
ous to himself. It left him cynical. He declined
to acknowledge the obligation of self-sacrifice ; pro-
nounced Montaigne's dictum, that to abandon
self-enjoyment in order to serve others is unnatural
and wrong, "a refreshing passage"; quoted with
approval Goethe's paradox, " I know not myself,

256 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

and God forbid I ever should." In his sister Dora's
heroism, which, in the light of Miss Lonsdale's book,
all England honoured, he saw only self-glorification
and misdirected energy. He lectured once at
Birmingham while she was combating small-pox at
Walsall : she came over to greet him, not having
seen him for years. " What, Dora ! " was his only
salutation, "still cutting off little Tommy's fingers
and little Jemmy's toes ? " It left him pessimist. As
student of history and politics he had seen one after
another millennium prevented by the thwarting
Spirit which, scevo Iceta negotioy loves unweariedly
to spite humanity ; Hellenic civilisation in one
century, "New Learning" in another, political
reform in his younger days, social emancipation in
his maturity. He refused to believe in the pro-
gressive happiness of mankind, and laughed to scorn
the amiable Tennysonian commonplace that good
will be the final end of ill. It left him, happily, as
it found him, a devotee of knowledge. He was as
nearly ornni-erudite as man can be in omni-parient
days : one who knew him well said of him that you
may dig into any portion of his mind with certainty
of turning up a nugget. In the book-lined gallery
which opened out of his drawing-room he would
sit or stand, in the short morning coat which he
affected as a dinner dress, the centre of a group of
guests, picked men from many walks of thought,
scientist, aesthetic, literary : as each proffered his
own patented topic Pattison would take it up and
handle it with swift, clear, exhaustive analysis,
ending always with an apologetic, " But, you know,
it's not my subject."

PATTISON 257

What was his subject ? He ranked specially as
an expert in moral philosophy, examining therein
at one time for the India Civil Service. I asked
him once about the relative merits of the candidates
as belonging to different Universities. He said
that the Oxford man, in shirt front, finger nails,
costume generally, was a thing of beauty — and
knew nothing ; the Cantab, slightly dingy — and
knew something ; the Caledonian knew little about
moral philosophy, much about the Scotchmen who
had handled it ; the Dublin man was a boor in ex-
ternals, but knew everything. Yet no one would
venture to limit his speciality to philosophy.
Apart from literature and philology, fresh chambers
were ever opening to one's quest in the basement
no less than in the higher stones of his mind.
He had a Yorkshireman's love of horses, and
cared to know who won the Derby. He narrowly
missed the championship of croquet, and could
diagnose the mental bias of the players round
him by their methods and tactics in the game. In
country walks he recognised the note of every
bird, and knew or sought to know the name, habit,
class, of every uncommon plant or hovering insect.
His talk of books was musical in its luminous
enthusiasm, and he read aloud the poetry he loved
with rare felicity. As a young man he had written
hymns for some of the minor Church festivals, but he
never enjoyed religious poetry, and would pitilessly
dissect the 97^09 and the diction of the " Christian
Year." He cared little for Tennyson or Brown-
ing, though he joined the Browning Society, and
once gave a characteristic address on " James Lee's

258 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Wife." Towards Milton he felt as a scholiast rather
than as a worshipper. Pope always appealed to
him ; he recited his poetry with a relishing ccesuric
swing, was proud of his own commentary on the
" Essay/' furious at a stereotyped error in the notes
which made him quote Milton's " Hymn on the
Nativity " as " Ode to Nature." He greatly enjoyed
Wordsworth in what he called his higher mood ;
moral, that is, not lyrical or romantic. Amongst
classic writers he placed ^schylus as unapproach-
able. Anna Swanwick used to relate that she was
reading alone in her drawing-room late one night,
when there came a ring at the bell and Pattison
walked in. "What is the finest poem in the
world?" She hesitated. He answered, "The
Agamemnon " ; turned on his heel, and disappeared.
His favourite Latin poet was Virgil ; Gray, and
perhaps Collins, he pronounced to be the only
English poets rivalling the artistic melody of the
Augustan age : he loved to read aloud the " Pro-
gress of Poesy," as the finest classical ode in the
language, always throwing away the book in anger
before the copybook bathos of the closing lines. On
his last night alive he desired to have read to him the
"Ode on Eton College," commenting as he listened
with all his old aptness, pregnancy, refinement.

But man cannot live by literary enthusiasm
alone ; and in Pattison's scheme of life there was
a fatal flaw — it lacked benevolence, participation,
sympathy :

" He did love Beauty only, Beauty seen
In all varieties of form and mind,
And Knowledge for its beauty ; "

PATTISON 259

and slighted Love avenged itself. His history
incarnated the " Palace of Art " ; he built for
himself a godlike life, but a life of godlike
isolation ; and so the unseen hand wrote " Mene,
Mene," on his palace walls, and the fruit which
he plucked so laboriously from the ambrosial
tree turned to an apple of Sodom at the last.
He was, indeed, in all points the antithesis of
Jowett. The one was idealist, the other prac-
tical ; a Cynic the one, while the other was a
Stoic. Pattison brooding, self-centred, morose ;
Jowett sweet-blooded, altruistic, sociable; Jowett
beamingly optimistic, Pattison pessimist to the
core. To his old friend's deathbed, so the tale
was current at the time, Jowett sent a farewell
message : " You have seen so much good in the
world that you may be hopeful of the future ! "
" I have seen so much wrong in the world,"
snarled Diogenes from his pillow, "that I have
no hope for the future ! " Sunt lacrymce ! Yet let
us remember, while we emphasise the contrast,
that to make allowance for the forces which
disturb the moral pendulum — heredity, constitu-
tion, temperament, environage — is outside our
power and our scope. Here, as elsewhere, comes
in the weighty " Judge not" of perfect insight
and of perfect charity, hushing our presumptuous
verdict, alike on the dejected and the buoyant
character, alike on the auspicious and the hapless
life, in the presence of the all-adjusting grave.

My analysis of Mark Pattison's character in the
" Reminiscences " brought me a deeply interesting

260 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

letter from one of his few very intimate associates,
who had been made conversant with the closing
incidents of his life. After pleading that I must
not take too literally his avowed contempt for
Altruism, since his wife's well-known crusade on
behalf of working women owed its initial energy
to him, while to the last he freely gave both toil
and money to the cause of higher female educa-
tion, my correspondent proceeds : " Your portrait
of the Rector is a very fine one ; but I could
have given you hints which would have coloured
your sketch, and rightly so, more to his mind.
I mean his true mind ; his contempt for dulness
often made him play tricks on stupid people. The
last thing read to him was not, as you say, Gray's
' Ode to Eton ' ; though that he frequently called
for, but Horace's Archytas Ode, which was
repeated by his wish over and over again. During
the last hours he made his Apologia, which was,
I believe, taken down by his wife, and is extant.
It came to this, that his aim had been to live for
knowledge ; knowledge not for its own sake, but
for the joy of acquiring it. His first conception
of this joy was given to him, he said, by Newman's
writings ; though he had come to gain a truer view
than did Newman of what knowledge really meant.
You ought also to know the truth about Sister
Dora. Like many brilliant hysterics, she was
a born romancer, driven by the dramatic instinct
to impress her company. This was so odious to
the Rector, that he never changed his estimate
of her. The family did change, when they found
she had a following. I must add my admiration

F. D. MAURICE 261

of your masterly sketch; I appreciate the power
of intellectual discrimination displayed in it." I
quoted as original his saying that the idea of
Deity was "defecated to a pure transparency." I
have since found it as used originally by Coleridge,
and applied by him not to the "idea of Deity/' but
to "the mist that stands between God and thee,"
which after all comes to nearly the same thing.

If Pattison and Jowett present a telling contrast,
so do Maurice and Pusey : alike in spiritual fervour,
occult influence, magical personality ; but origi-
nating in very different impulses and ending in
very different convictions. Pusey ascended to his
mission from long deep theologic study ; Maurice
came down to it from the top of Sinai, a prophet
on fire with his message. Pusey's development
from the Tractarian starting-point was intelligible
and easily traced ; Maurice moved in a maze of
contradictions and surprises. Though he hated
controversy, his life was one long combat ; of
large charity and deep humility, he tomahawked
opponents with savage personal violence ; preach-
ing Radical doctrines, he upheld aristocracy and
feudalism ; was labelled Broad Church by all
parties, while holding with devout acceptance the
Prayer Book, Catechism, Thirty-Nine Articles, and
Athanasian Creed.

Maurice was cradled amid theological strife. His
father was a Unitarian minister, his mother a
Calvinist, one sister Anglican, another Baptist. The
stern tradition of his home forbade the reading
of fiction — shut him out from all enjoyment of

262 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

external nature ; it was an atmosphere of thin, cold
thought, moral polemic, intellectual puzzlement.
He emerged from it with one dominant desire,
which shaped all his speculations and determined
his ultimate belief — a passionate longing for unity.
At Cambridge his mind grew rapidly, under the
genial tutorship of Julius Hare, the stimulating
society of the " Apostles" — above all, through close
intimacy with Sterling. Refusing to purchase a
Fellowship by conformity to the Church, he slipped
away without a degree for a course of journalism
in London, contributing to The Westminster
Review, and for a time editing The Athenceum. Dis-
turbed by mental anxieties and deeming his life a
failure, he entered himself at Oxford, in the hope
there to attain some moral and religious standpoint.
I have told in another chapter (p. 89) how, during
a walk with me through Oxford in the Fifties, the
late Sir Thomas Acland, his lifelong and admiring
friend, stopped before the Martyrs' door of St.
Mary Magdalen Church, and said, "Twenty-five
years ago Jacobson and I took F. D. Maurice in
there to be baptized." He read desperately hard ;
published a self-revealing novel, " Eustace Conway " ;
was ordained to a country curacy ; became chaplain
of Guy's Hospital ; and embodied the outcome of a
ten years' mental struggle in his " Kingdom of
Christ," that book which abides to-day a record of
soul-building not less arresting to the psychologist
than the apologies of the brothers Newman, ]. A.
Froude, and Blanco White. His apprehension of
God was intuitional. He would not see design in
Nature, infer a Summun Pulchrum, deify the ideal

F. D. MAURICE 263

human self, accept an authoritative revelation : like
a Hebrew prophet, he saw the Lord sitting on His
throne. Possessed of, and hourly living in, this
presence, he deduced from it his view of nature, of
humanity, of life. With Augustine, he beheld a
City of the World, a welter of individualism,
inequality, competition, warfare, selfishness : be-
held, too, a City of God, a universal spiritual
society, attested in old experience, latent yet dis-
cernible in mankind to-day. Behind the pageant
of society, the rise and fall of nations, the jar of
creeds, the tangle of contemporary politics, he saw
the ever-advancing onset of spiritual energies,
drawing men together by a comity of righteousness,
wherein all bear others' burdens, finding each his
own satisfaction in the satisfaction of all. And the
constitution of this society was monarchic : it was
not a mystical abstraction, but a visible kingdom,
ruled by an ever-present King. He saw it in the
Catholic Church, its gate of baptism, its Eucharistic
guarantee, its witnessing Bible, its consummation in
the Athanasian Trinity : found finally — a crowning
solecism and surprise to his admirer ]. S. Mill — in
the English Church a rock on which, after much
tossing to and fro, he felt that he could rest. Yet
with no party in that Church was he on consenting
terms. He controverted Pusey's tract on baptism ;
scoffed alike at the Low Church craving for
personal salvation, the High Church academic and
tradition-bound formality, the Broad Church
independence of dogma. Their systems all began
with man, his sinfulness, his needs, his aspirations ;
Maurice's starting-point was God. The phrase may

264 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

mean little or much : fully to appreciate its force
and its clue to all his action we must read his
writings. When once it is grasped, we can co-
ordinate all his religious inconsistencies : the
thwarting limitations and timidities which sorely
tried his colleagues in the social crusade; his horror
of democracy ; his shrinking from co-operative
action ; his halting attitude towards Socialism ; his
anti-Sabbatarianism; his historic denial of eternal
punishment ; above all, his furious denunciation of
Hansel's jaunty agnosticism, humorously char-
acterised by one of his biographers as a theology
of Caliban upon Setebos.

One more factor in this strangely compounded
nature must be taken into account — the loathing
of oppression which hurled him into every fray
upon the weaker side ; against the tyranny of an un-
reasoning majority, against unfair popular clamour,
against the bray of the religious press, which he
honoured with the most truculent of all his hatreds.
He defended Ward in 1844 — fought for Pusey
against the Six Doctors, for Jowett against Pusey,
for Colenso against Gray, for Bennett of St.
Barnabas' against the Protestant mob.

He lived an isolated life — it was his prayer that
he might do so — and he left no followers. Yet,
paradoxical and inconsequent as he often was, his
message was the message of a prophet ; and as a
prophet he was received by those who had ears
to hear. "The greatest mind since Plato" was
the judgment of Archdeacon Hare. Tennyson's
admiring lines of tribute " break with the music
of waves upon the Channel shore." "The most

THOMSON 265

beautiful human soul/' said Kingsley, who, after
Sterling; knew and loved him best — "the most
beautiful human soul whom I have ever met with
upon earth, of all men approaching nearest to my
conception of St. John, the Apostle of Love."

The "Essays and Reviews," with Stanley's tre-
mendous article in the Edinburgh, provoked a
counterblast of conservative theology, in a long-
forgotten "Aids to Faith," edited by Archbishop
Thomson, then Provost of Queen's, who had him-
self, amusing to relate, written a paper which
missed insertion in the famous volume only by
being sent in too late. I knew him as a Fellow
long before ; we were both on the committee of
the "Amateur," and worked together at the pro-
grammes. He was an enthusiastic musician, with
a superb baritone voice ; no one who heard it will
forget his singing of the "Boar's Head" chant at
the Queen's College Christmas dinner. In his
rooms I first received the idea of what came after-
wards to be called " culture " ; his talk and the
books which lay about giving outlook into a wider
world than had dawned on the ordinary academic.
Educated under Butler at Shrewsbury, he came
up to Queen's in 1836, was idle, recovered himself,
and became a Michel Fellow of the College. His
line as a Tutor was philosophy ; his " Laws of
Thought " was for many years a valued text-book.
His Bampton Lectures on "The Atonement"
passed into the limbo retained for these annual
apologies of orthodoxy ; but his presentation to
All Souls, Marylebone, enabled him to attract
fashionable crowds, and made him known outside

266 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

the University. During his residence in College
Mr. and Mrs. Skene of Rubislaw, with their family,
came to reside in Oxford. We had all read our
Lockhart, and looked with deep interest on the
white-haired laird, Walter Scott's lifelong friend,
accomplished horseman, draughtsman, antiquarian,
godfather to the Fourth Canto of " Marmion,"
to whom Scott owed the conception of the Jews
in "Ivanhoe," and of "Quentin Durward." With
them was a middle-aged daughter, who sang
Handel finely and wrote religious novels, and two
young grand-daughters, one pretty, the other
clever : let me not be supposed to allege that the
pretty sister was dull or the clever sister plain ;
but so it was, that men used to manoeuvre at
dinner-parties to take down the clever sister and
sit opposite the pretty one. This last — the " Greek
Slave " she was called, her mother being a Levan-
tine— was soon surrounded by admirers ; from
them she selected Thomson, and they were
married on his appointment to the London living.
In 1855 he was made Provost of Queen's. The
election was decided by his vote in favour of him-
self, and his right to take part in it, being a married
Fellow in his year of grace, was challenged; but
he persisted, and carried his point, not without
abiding friction between himself and the dissenting
electors. At Prince Albert's death his name was
found prominent on the list of clergymen whom
the Prince thought deserving of promotion, and
he became at short intervals a Royal Chaplain,
Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, Archbishop of
York. The final nomination was said to have been

THOMSON

267

a compromise between the Queen and the Prime
Minister. She had marked her old friend Bishop
Wilberforce for the see ; but Lord Palmerston,
between whom and the Bishop there was constant
feud, named VValdegrave of Carlisle; and, when
neither would give way, threw upon the Queen
the responsibility of making the appointment.
She was at Coburg, and on receiving Palmerston's
letter desired to have the names read over to her.
Of several names she said tl No — they will not do " :
at the last, when Thomson's came, she said — " Yes,
let it be he ; the Prince always thought well of
him." As Archbishop, Thomson hardly fulfilled
the expectation which dictated and accompanied
his rapid rise. Unpopular in London society, it
was early understood that he would never succeed
to the higher throne of Canterbury. This he had
always expected would be his ; S. Wilberforce's
diary notes on his non-appointment, " Thomson
much disappointed." He preached, now and
again, extraordinarily eloquent sermons : Dean
Stanley, and Thompson, afterwards Master of
Trinity, both noted discourses of his in West-
minster Abbey as amongst the best which they
had ever heard ; and his rare appearances on public
platforms were marked by addresses of the very
highest order ; but these efforts were isolated and
eruptive ; so that, unquestionably in his own time
the ablest prelate on the bench, he left no mark
either on his Church or on the community. His
presence was remarkably imposing, of great bulk
and stature, with massive features, sonorous de-
livery, dignified and stately manners. Imprudently

268 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

exerting himself when unwell in a December
Ordination, the action of his heart failed, and he
died on Christmas Day, 1890.

I have said nothing of the early parochial
Oxford pulpits. At the opening of the Thirties
Evangelicalism was dominant, trumpeted by a
tremendous Boanerges named Bulteel, whose
powerful but sulphurous sermons filled St. Ebbe's
Church. He made a name for himself outside his
squalid parish, attacked the Heads of Houses for
sloth and unfaithfulness in a violent University
sermon, whose impeachments they but feebly
answered, practised faith healing successfully in
cases where physicians were in vain, ministered in
conventicles, found his licence revoked by Bishop
Lloyd, whom he thereupon denounced publicly as
" an officer of Antichrist," built a chapel of his own,
and founded a not long-lived sect of Bulteelites.
Reviving High Churchism first echoed in St. Peter's
Church, about 1835, from the lips and practice of
Edward Denison and his curate Walter Kerr
Hamilton, both afterwards Bishops of Salisbury.
I remember the beautiful old Norman edifice in my
boyhood, neglected and dilapidated : I sat with my
mother in a large, high, square pew, into which
we locked ourselves on entering, and prayed for
their most gracious Majesties King William and
Queen Adelaide. A lady in the adjacent pew
interested me always by turning eastward and
thereby facing us when the Creed was recited ;
it was explained to me that she was "a very old-
fashioned person." In 1836 the church was re-

GOULBURN 269

stored (we worshipping the while in Merton
Chapel), an ugly clerk's house in the churchyard
swept away, the vast family pews abolished, the
services improved to a pitch for that time highly
ornate, starveling as it would seem now. Denison
was followed by Hamilton ; Hamilton by William
Adams, author of the once famous " Allegories ";
Adams by Stewart Bathurst, who followed Newman
to Rome ; he by Edmund Hobhouse, not long
deceased, at a great age, emeritus Bishop of Nelson.
Few churches have ever been so shepherded in
a succession so long unbroken. It was believed
that a particular set of Merton rooms in which
these pastors lived held an occult power of
episcopal generation ; certainly I have breakfasted
there with three occupants who afterwards became
bishops.

Good men as all these were, yet, with the
exception of Adams, who at his early death left
behind him a volume of touching sermons, none
of them made the drum ecclesiastic musically re-
sonant. That distinction was reserved for Goul-
burn in the opening of the Forties. "'Obhouse
and 'Ansell are below par/' said Mr. Hounslow,
the Radical grocer in High Street, to a stranger in
quest of Sunday pabulum ; " go to 'Olywell and
'ear Goulburn." Always noted as a preacher, Goul-
burn was a man rather lovable than eminent, a man
who sank into the surroundings of the high posts
he filled, discharging their duties conscientiously,
but affixing to them no stamp of genius. A Balliol
Scholar, he was intimate with Lake, Stanley, Brodie,
Waldegrave, Golightly ; gained a First Class, and

270 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

became Fellow of Merton. These laurels won,
he started on a tour with Stanley, which was
terminated by an accident to his leg. Stanley used
to tell how, overhearing from his bed the physician,
Dr. Bruno — Byron's incapable doctor sixteen years
before — express his fear lest suppuration should
set in, the invalid called out in his mincing tones,
" Sup-pu-ration — I never heard the word before,
but it exactly expresses what I feel." Rescued
from suppuration and from Bruno, he returned
home to take Orders and to become Vicar of the
small Holywell parish. His wife was of the Aynhoe
Cartwright family ; he brought his bride to the
pretty little Holywell Cottage, now swept away,
and at once made his mark as a preacher. Towns-
people and undergraduates swelled his congre-
gations, finding in the frankness, variety, humanism,
of his sermons a refreshing contrast to the texti-
ferous platitudes or the dry formalisms emitted
respectively from neighbouring Low or High
Church pulpits. Nor was the absurd strain wanting
which ran ever through his character, actions, talk.
Delicious bits of finical rhetoric, set off by his
detached, tinkling, monosyllabic delivery, come
up to me out of the past; as when, preaching on
the Jews of Berea, he began, " It may be predicated
of the Bereans that they permitted no extraneous
circumstances to counteract the equipoise of their
equanimity " ; or when, magnifying the wisdom of
Providential adaptation in nature, he concreted his
illustration by a lt min-now," which swam so often
into our ken as to be at last greeted with a general
titter. His theology, baldly Calvinistic at the outset.

GOULBURN 271

was afterwards modified by contact with Samuel
Wilberforce, when that astute prelate, all things to
all men in his diocese, muzzled his Low Church
opponents — Litton, Hayward Cox, John Hill, and
others — by making their like-minded friend Goul-
burn one of his examining chaplains. It culminated
finally in that dexterously balanced Anglican ortho-
doxy which, whatever its effect upon their intel-
lectual expansion, earns for its doctrinaires the
valuable repute of "soundness," and so "not
unfrequently leads to positions of considerable
emolument." l It led Goulburn to a post for which
he was certainly not suited, the Headmastership
of Rugby. In the competition his rival was Lake,
on all grounds a fitter man. Lake was essentially
an educator, Goulburn restrictedly an evangelist.
Lake represented all the tendencies and traditions
which had made Rugby the first school in England,
Goulburn must inevitably thwart them : to the
Tory trustees who held the election in their hands,
and who later on appointed Hayman, that was
Goulburn's strongest recommendation. They
chose Goulburn and rejected Lake, causing Arthur
Stanley, for once in his placable life, to lose his
temper and say hard things.

Goulburn went to Rugby with misgivings, found
the work uncongenial, after eight years resigned it
with delight. " He was not/' writes to me an old
pupil who was in his house and loved him well,
"he was not intended to be a headmaster. He
was a mediaeval saint with great social power ;
simplicity itself, with the pomposity of a D,P, of
1 Page 124.

272 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

those times : he used, for instance, to go out to
dinner in his cassock, and never appeared without
it among us boys. He preached on excellent
theses, but loved Latinised expressions : ' Let the
scintillations of your wit be like the coruscations
of summer lightning, lambent but innocuous.' He
believed in surprises to attract attention ; would
preach on occasions from the eagle instead of
from the pulpit, would choose as a text 'The
King of Jericho, one ; the King of Ai, one/ and
so on, reading out all the thirty-one in order ;
would conceal a horsewhip under his gown in
school, and crack it to help out a passage in
Aristophanes. He seldom knew one boy from
another : ' Well, little boy, what do you want ? '
passing his hand over one's head in a fatherly
way, but having forgotten all the previous inter-
view. He was fleeced by his servants, who starved
us ; adored personally by Benson, who saw his
goodness ; ridiculed by Bradley, who saw his
failures : Compton was his relative, and the first
attempt at a science master in the school ; a good
attempt, but badly carried out. When Goulburn
left, he tried to keep out Temple in favour of Fan-
shawe from Bedford, but happily failed. Temple
restored discipline by a system of superannuation.
Had it not been for Tom Evans, Bradley, Benson,
as assistant masters, the teaching would have been
as bad a failure as the discipline. And yet he was
an ideal gentleman and a Christian."

He returned to the field in which he was an
expert, the field of parochial and pastoral work,
at Quebec Chapel and St. John's, Paddington ;

GOULBURN 273

until he made perhaps the second blunder of
his life by accepting the Deanery of Norwich.
As Dean he found scope for his preaching power,
but was deficient in the secular and practical side
of chapter work. At this time were written many
of his devotional manuals, and by these his name
will be remembered longest. Once or twice he
took public action ; when Stanley was made Select
Preacher at Oxford he protested by resigning the
similar office which he held ; but the step left un-
touched their personal friendship, and on Stanley's
death he preached a funeral sermon which, since
Burgon sternly denounced it, was probably in all
ways generous and Christian. He wrote afterwards
the Life of that eccentric divine. Few men have
offered scope so inviting to a biographer — at once
poet, critic, artist, theologian, buffoon, at once in-
decently scurrilous and riotously comic, he lived
and died as if to inspire above all things a brief
and brilliant memoir : but Goulburn produced
two ponderous volumes as unreadable as the
" Guicciardini " of Macaulay's anecdote. After a
time his deanery palled on him as his head-
mastership had done : its quasi-episcopal rubs
and worries, exhilarating to a Wilberforce or a
Magee, were to him intolerable; he long pined
to be rid of it, and at last resigned it. The closing
public act of his life was to join with Denison,
Liddon, and a few, a very few, besides, in a de-
claration, called forth by " Lux Mundi," on the
" Truth of Holy Scripture," which, defiant of
German exegesis, of geological discovery, of uni-
versally accepted Darwinism, restated solemnly,

s

274 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

sadly, helplessly, the abandoned theories of un-
adjusted Biblical criticism. There is a double
pathos in such spectacles, familiar as they are to
times of mental change : pathos in the heart-
sickness of the seniors, left to stand alone in
ancient ways, whence all but they have fled ;
from which the forces of enlarged conviction
have driven the disciples and the friends who
once walked with them there ; pathos in the half-
compassionate reluctance of the younger men to
break away, galled by the stigma of desertion,
yet submissive to the beckoning of a hand their
elders cannot see. Some of us, it may be, can
remain apart from and feel sympathy with both ;
discerning, from our vantage ground outside the
conflict, that the old paths and the new, if tra-
versed in obedience to the prick of conscience
and of duty, lead to the same goal at last.

I come to the last of my Papavera, to William
Sewell, subsequent founder of Radley, prominent
Fellow of Exeter in the Thirties, a flourishing
and conspicuous, yet somehow a questionable,
specimen — what botanists call Papaver dubimn —
among the poppies of his day. In fluency of
speech, fertility of mind, fascination of manner,
he had no contemporary rival ; his public teach-
ing, like his private talk, was ever rousing, per-
suasive, lofty; it seemed that those eloquent lips
could open only to emit godlike sentiments and
assert uncompromising principles. In truth, they
were not often closed : he was Select Preacher
and Professor of Moral Philosophy ; his lectures

SEWELL 275

on Plato and on Shakespeare filled Exeter College
Hall ; while in London, as Whitehall Preacher,
he drew large crowds, amused to hear leading
statesmen of the day denounced under the names
of Herod and Pontius Pilate. "More Puseyite
than Pusey," his emotional theology attracted a
shallower yet scarcely a less numerous class than
Newman's inspired sermons. 1 1 seemed that a mitre,
a Headmastership, or at least the Headship of his
College, must descend upon so gifted and so popular
an aspirant : yet standing for Winchester in 1835
he was beaten by Moberly ; yet when old Collier
Jones, the MapiKat^ 'Icovevs of Scott's verses,
died in 1839, Richards, not Sewell, was elected ;
and, in spite of the promptings of the Ttmesy whose
young chief Walter had been his pupil, right reverend
Howleys and Blomfields at headquarters were
understood to shake doubtful wigs when his name
was mentioned for promotion. A taint of super-
ficiality clung to him : " Sewell is very unreal," wrote
Newman to Bowden in 1840; "Namby-pamby"
Hampden called him ; ll Preaches his dreams " was
shrewd Shuttleworth's comment on his University
sermons ; " Sewell," said Jowett in 1848, " Sewell,
talking rashly and positively, . . . has gone far to
produce that very doubt and scepticism of which he
himself complains." " How silent you have been,
Jacobson," said he at the end of a large gathering
in his rooms, where, as usual, he had done all
the talking ; " you have not said anything worth
listening to." " Nor heard," was Jacobson's answer.
So through the Forties he continued Tutor of
Exeter — "excessively discursive," says Dean Boyle ;

276 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

"would commence a lecture on Aristotle and end
with the Athanasian Creed or the beauties of Gothic
architecture." "Sewell's last" formed the staple
of Exeter breakfast parties. I well remember his
cremation of Froude's " Nemesis of Faith/' a feat
reduced from myth to fact in Max Miiller's " Auld
Lang Syne." "What is meant by gold, frankin-
cense, myrrh ? " he propounded on another day.
The regulation answer was given. " Yes ; but shall
you understand me if I tell you that they also mean
logic, rhetoric, and metaphysics ? " Many more I
could relate, but ex ungue leonem. Meanwhile men
around him were moving on, and he marked time :
opposed in a once famous hysterical sermon the
erection of the new Museum; wrote, under the
title of " Lord John Russell's Postbag," a series
of lampoons, discreditable in their imputations and
distortive of his opponents' motives, against the Uni-
versity Commission. He was to learn that v/3pk
has its nemesis no less than faith : a translation
of the Odes of Horace from his pen was mercilessly
gibbeted in the Edinburgh by John Conington, and
all England laughed over a review by Conybeare
of his " Year's Volume of Sermons." Both articles
were, of course, intentionally punitive ; the second
was good-humoured, and the savagery of the first
was justifiable. I have not seen the Horace for
fifty years, but some of its absurdities still cling to
me. Here is his opening of the Parentis olim :

" If a man upon a time
Ever has with hand of crime
Wrenched his sire's aged neck, I ween
'Tts that he hath eating been
Garlic, deadlier without question

SEWELL 277

E'en than hemlock : oh digestion
Hard as iron of the reaper !
What is this, that still so deep here,
Keeps turmoiling in my chest?"

We laughed ; but I do not think he lost general
repute. He remained the exciting public lecturer
and preacher, the supremely fascinating talker, the
genial and accomplished host ; entertaining in this
last capacity the Archaeological Society in 1850 at
a magnificent entertainment, when the Fellows'
pretty garden was illuminated, the great Service
tree hung with coloured lamps, the Distin family
performing upon their saxhorns in the Hall. Mean-
while his energy had broken out in a new place.
One of the cleverest of Oxford skits, " The Grand
University Logic Stakes of 1849," 1 attributed to
Landon of Magdalen, and academising with mar-
vellous dexterity the language of the Turf, de-
scribed the "runners" for the Praelectorship of
Logic in 1839 anc* 1849. Sewell bears the stable
name of "Gruel," so richly descriptive of his
querulous invalid voice and cataplasmic counte-
nance that it clung to him ever after.

" Gruel continues to make a show in the world, and stands
high in public estimation. He has taken to a novel line, in
which he has come out rather strong. He appears to have left
the Turf altogether for the present. After a long season in
Ireland, where, notwithstanding several influential Backers, he
seems to have been a failure, he returned to the Marquis of
Exeter's stables. His lordship still drives him in his four-in-
hand, giving him an occasional day's work at Radley Farm,
where he goes to plough and drill on a new system with an
Irish horse called Single-peeper."

1 Appendix R.

278 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

There was in the Forties an epidemic of High
Church novelettes. Sewell's name appeared as
editor on the title-page of his sister's popular tales,
"Amy Herbert" and her successors, and he him-
self wrote " Hawkstone," a queer, sensational pro-
duction, but hinting an idea which had for some
time taken possession of his mind — the establish-
ment of an educational institution " on a new
system," on the lines of our older public schools,
but with minute observance of Prayer Book rules.
The consequence elsewhere attaching to slowly
matured antiquity was here to be ready made, by
sumptuous fittings and surroundings, academic
dress, a collegiate framework in which the head
was to be a "warden," the assistant masters
"fellows." St. Columba's College was opened in
1844 at Stackallan, in County Meath. Its warden
was Singleton, afterwards head of Radley ; its sub-
warden Tripp of Worcester, an enthusiastic, amiable,
not powerfully minded Wykehamist. It received
munificent support from Lord Adare, from the
Primate, from William Monsell, and from Dr. Todd
of T.C.D. ; but friction soon arose, and the site was
moved to Rathfarnham on the Dublin mountains,
where I believe it still survives. Sewell retired from
the enterprise, and in 1847 opened St. Peter's
College, Radley, on the same lines, with Singleton
as its first warden. For this venture large sums
were wanted ; Sewell obtained them by his extra-
ordinary genius for enlisting the sympathies and
picking the pockets of plutocrats, calling frequently,
it was said, at great merchants' counting-houses
and coming out with weighty cheques. Soon

SEWELL 279

visitors from Oxford saw cubicled dormitories,
a tastefully decorated chapel with a fine Flemish
triptych, magnificent carved oak sideboards, tables,
cabinets, and, it must be added, very few boys.

Warden Singleton, whom I knew intimately, was
one of the noblest of men, self-sacrificing, generous,
high-principled, true as truth itself. From consider-
able private means he had given bounteously to
both schools, lending money to Sewell as well.
The moral tone of the boys under his rule was
perfect, their scholarship respectable, they loved
him dearly, he managed economically the current
outlay; buti\ie numbers did not rise. His manners
told unfavourably on Oxford men ; over a pipe
or on board his yacht he was a genial Irish gentle-
man, but at the Radley high table, exalting not
his person but his office, his stern elevation of
manner was repellent. Hascoll, the sub-warden,
a half-pay naval captain, who spoke French and
was supposed to teach it, had no social qualifica-
tions. The assistant masters were gentlemen but
not scholars, for the salaries were very low ; the
only honour man amongst them, Howard of
Lincoln, son to Charles Howard, R.A.; afterwards
Director-General of Public Instruction at Bombay ;
spent all his time in plaguing Singleton and
agitating for a stronger brew of college beer ;
for by the statutes the " fellows " were independent
of and could control the warden, and three amongst
them succeeded in driving Singleton from his
post. They chose instead of him William Heathcote
of New College, who promptly dismissed the insur-
rectionary cabal ; but, discovering after a time

280 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

the unsound financial basis of the school, and
prevented from obtaining a proper audit of the
accounts by Sewell's refusal to explain a certain
large and unaccountable deficit, he in his turn
threw up the post. Sewell now perforce took
the reins himself, with a great name, magnificent
conceptions, and a genial acquiescence in Ancient
Pistol's motto, " Base is the slave who pays." The
school went up with a rush, the " eight" rowed
at Henley ; entertainments were given on saints'
days, the " college plate" on the tables, the senior
boy, " Bob " Risley, welcoming the guests in Latin
speeches; Sewell proclaiming in terms of pious
gratitude that the school was out of debt, at a time
when I knew him to owe Singleton ^5000, and
more than suspected far heavier liabilities behind.
In fact, the splendour, like Timon's, " masked an
empty coffer." The school had never paid ; after
the first capital was exhausted reckless purchases
had gone on ; cases of decorative treasures, in-
cluding Agra marbles at a guinea a foot, lay still
packed in outhouses as they had arrived, to be sold
for a trifle when the bubble burst ; heavy loans
were obtained, heavier debts heaped up ; boys were
taken for six years' payment in advance at largely
reduced fees, which vanished as soon as they were
received. Finally, to celebrate the opening of
a new gymnasium, which cost somebody £1600,
a Belshazzar feast was given to all who then
or in the past had been connected with St.
Columba's or with Radley. A vast assembly came ;
Sewell, in full Doctor's dress of scarlet and black
velvet, welcomed us — as usual, a perfect host. We

SEWELL 281

sat to a splendid banquet ; Dan Godfrey's band
discoursed sweet music ; 600 Ib. of strawberries, we
were told, covered the tables at dessert, and all went
merry as a marriage bell. After dinner, not
waiting for the concert, as my wife and I sat
expecting our carriage in an unlighted corner,
we saw Hubbard of the Bank of England, whom
I knew to have made large advances, pacing up and
down alone, with anxious face and corroded brow.
" The handwriting on the wall," I whispered ;
and so it was. The reckless extravagance of that
evening scared him ; a closer inspection of the
school affairs revealed secrets of indebtedness
which had been hitherto concealed from him.
Within a few days he seized the place as principal
creditor, sent Sewell right away, repudiated all
his debts, cancelled the claims of parents who had
paid in advance, sold all unnecessary splendours,
placed in charge Norman, one of the masters
who was highly popular with the boys, to work the
school as his property in reduction of its dues
to him. Sewell came into Oxford a broken
man, then disappeared ; lived for some years on
the Continent; returned to England, and died in
1874, at the house of a nephew near Manchester.

CHAPTER XVI

WALK ABOUT ZION

" Since all that is not heaven must fade ,
Light be the hand of Ruin laid

Upon the home I love :
With hilling spell let soft Decay
Steal on, and spare the giant sway,
The crash of tower and grove?*

— KEBLE.

Venerable Oxford — Ancient Landmarks — The Greyhound — Mother
Jeffs — Mother Louse— Mother George — Mother Goose — The
Angel — Some Old Establishments — The High — Jubber's and
Sadler's — Convivialities — Changes — The Oxford that I love.

THE Psalmist bade his countrymen mark the
towers, bulwarks, palaces of their historic city in its
prime of queenliness, that they might " tell it to the
generations following." What would the Biblical
student give for such a Hestiagraph to-day ? Many
a fragmentary chapter of Jewish story might be well
replaced by a brief record, contemporary, personal,
picturesque, of the scenes which are now to us mere
shadow-names : Solomon's Palace and the Royal
Tombs, the Tyropceon megaliths and the Bakers'
Street, the pools of Enrogel, Gihon, Siloam, the
gilded dome of Zion "towering o'er her marble
stairs." Oxford is not, like Jerusalem, a buried
city ; yet the Oxford of to-day is not the Oxford
of the Thirties ; ever and again as I recall events

and personages they need the background and

282

WALK ABOUT ZION 283

the setting which enshrined them then, and is
now impaired or swept away. The dreaming spires
of the sweet city show still from the Cumnor or
the Rose Hill heights, as they showed to Matthew
Arnold sixty years ago ; he could not now go on to
say that "she lies steeped in sentiment, spreading
her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from
her towers the last enchantments of the Middle
Age," for the encroaching nineteenth century has
dissolved that still removed charm.1 Tram-lines
mar to-day the pontifical symmetry of Magdalen
Bridge ; an intruding chasm breaks the perfect
High Street curves ; St. Mary's spire, tapering from
its nest of pinnacles, has been twice deformed
by restoration ; Vanbrugh's quaint house in Broad
Street is sacrificed to a stodgy Indian Institute :
Christchurch Meadow with its obstructed river
banks tempts me to render railing for railing ;
the Broad Walk veterans are disarrayed or fallen ;
a vulgar and discordant <pile has banished the civil-
suited nymphs of Merton Grove. Visiting extant

1 Let me go back further still, and embalm forgotten lines
from Tom Warton's " Triumph of I sis " :

"Ye fretted pinnacles, ye fanes sublime,
Ye towers that wear the mossy vest of time,
Ye massy piles of old munificence,
At once the pride of learning and defence ;
Ye cloisters pale, that length'ning on the sight
To contemplation, step by step, invite ;
Ye high-arched walks, where oft the whispers clear
Of harps unseen have swept the poet's ear ;
Ye temples dim, where pious duty pays
Her holy hymns for ever echoing praise ;
Lo ! your loved Isis from the bordering vale
With all a mother's fondness bids you Hail ! "

284 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Oxford, I should explore the venerable haunts, seek
the ancient Termini, probe the mouldering associa-
tions of High and Broad, of Iffley Road, and
Cowley Marsh, and Bullingdon all in vain, like
Rogers' old man wandering in quest of something.
The change had begun when Arnold wept over
Thyrsis' urn — "In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps
the same " ; it is far more devastating to-day. Let
me in this last paper recover where I can its erased
or vanishing landmarks — forntce veneres captare
fugaces — as a setting to the recorded incidents
and characters which they should illustrate and
frame.

In the early Thirties, then, railroads and en-
closures had not girdled Oxford proper with a
coarse suburban fringe. On the three approaches
to the town, the Henley, Banbury, Abingdon
Roads, it was cut off, clear as a walled and gated
Jericho, from the adjacent country. One side of
it there is which I now never dare approach :
enclosure Acts and jerry builders and villatic
burghers have effaced by "long straggling streets
of ricketty cottages " what was once the most
harmonious avenue to the most beautiful city in
the world. In the days when Tullus was Consul
you sped through Nuneham, Sandford, and Little-
more behind the four horses of the Tantivy or
the Rival, until from Rose Hill top you saw and
never lost again the long line of pinnacles and
spires bosomed in foliage less obscuring than to-
day. Past Rose Bank, the home of Newman's
mother and her two clever girls, the road ran for
a short distance much as it runs now, then opened

WALK ABOUT ZION 285

houseless and hedgeless all the way, marked only
by one towering hawthorn known as the "half-
way bush/' to the turnpike which barred access
to Magdalen Bridge. Far to the right stretched
the northern view, across Cowley Marsh, the
windows of newly-built Headington Asylum glaring
in the western sun, up the Bullingdon ascent,
where I have many times shot snipe and gathered
Parnassia and butterwort, arid so away to Shot-
over. On the left were the unbroken willow-dotted
I sis meadows, rising beyond the gleaming river
into Bagley Wood, and to the line of Berkshire
hills crowned by Cumnor Hurst and the Gipsy
Scholar's Tree. As you neared Oxford, on what
is now Christchurch Cricket-ground were unen-
closed acres of wheat, decked with poppies,
scabious, corn cockle, and blue centaury ; on the
opposite side towered three vast black hillocks,
to and from which all day long passed the Corpora-
tion carts laden with coal refuse of a thousand
hearths, to be sifted and sold as cinder or as ash.
Along the smooth hard road streamed in endless
variety the vehicles of pre-railroad days ; mail
coaches by the score, gigs, tandems, carriages and
four, carriers' carts from adjacent villages and
towns, mighty petorrita of the great London stage-
waggoners, lowlier wains heaped high with hay and
corn. The bordering gravel path was sprinkled
in early morning by troops of fresh-faced girls
bearing poised upon their heads high wicker
baskets filled with fruit, vegetables, turnip-tops ;
in the afternoon by academical pedestrians in
pairs or triplets, transacting the regulation grind

286 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

to Iffley, Cowley, or Sandford. Not that the
word "grind" was invented then; that and "con-
stitutional " were subsequent terms, the last, I think,
first made classical by Miss Cornelia Blimber.
Dons were there as well as undergraduates, even
one or two Heads of Houses ; old Sneyd of All
Souls, and tall Plumtre of University, walking
daily solitary and solemn, sometimes Gaisford
with a handsome daughter, and Macbride with a
daughter who was certainly not handsome. There
too on most days was to be seen a regiment of
boys, commanded by a stern Orbilius clad in
spencer and black gaiters, which was known as
"Slatter's School." Located at Rose Hill, it was
famous far and near ; the best Oxford families
sent to it all their sons. Amongst my school-
fellows were Le Mesurier, a brilliant scholar
of Corpus, who died young ; Haggitt, son to
Lord Harcourt's Nuneham chaplain mentioned
in Madame D'Arblay's diary ; and afterwards, as
Wegg Prosser, M.P. for Hereford ; Stowe, First
Class and Fellow of Oriel, who went out as
Times correspondent to the Crimea and there died ;
Faussett, till lately the efficient Bursar of Christ-
church ; and Fred Thistlethwaite, famous in
London society for his immense wealth and his
manner of spending it : he achieved unique dis-
tinction by running away from Eton, Harrow, and
Winchester in succession : of the three schools
he found Winchester the most intolerable, and
resigned it after three days' trial. His father, a
Hampshire squire, owned land in what was then
the village of Paddington ; converted into West-

WALK ABOUT ZION 287

bournia it became golden, and Fred was the
heres dignior. Slatter was a remarkable man ; an
accomplished chemist, and one of the best astro-
nomers of his time, having a mighty Herschel's
telescope in constant use. He was an admirable
teacher ; no boys in England were better grounded
than ourselves, nor in a greater variety of subjects ;
but he was disciplinary even in excess of the
savage custom then thought necessary in schools.
His desk was garnished with a quite curious
collection of canes incessantly in use a posteriori,
and a large wooden tubeless thermometer was
reserved for hand-spanking, or, as he called it,
" strappado." To the music of these flagellants
all our work was set : stimulated by my mother,
I kept account during one half-year of my own
personal tragedies : they numbered fifty-two, re-
presenting on an average more than two in a week,
administered for no default of immorality or dis-
obedience, but for syntactical fallacies in construing,
or for Propria Quce Maribus incompletely learned.
We endured stoically ; to cry out was thought
pusillanimous ; like Dido, we wept in silence,
accepting the baculi ictus as no less germane to
progress than were Grammar and Delectus. And
we bore no malice ; went back to pay friendly
visits to our Busby after we thad left; hoped
nothing worse for him when consigned to Iffley
churchyard than that he might be tended in his
repose by cherubs structurally impervious to the
discipline, which even in another world he might
find impossible to lay aside.

One feature of the Via Appia to the Sacred

288 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

City I have not mentioned, old St. Clement's
Church, standing in the fork of the Headington
and Iffley roads at the entrance on Magdalen
Bridge. Andrew Lang in his book on Oxford
tells us that visitors approaching it by the eastern
entrance would pass the "boiled rabbit" on their
right. That is not so; the " boiled rabbit" was
built during Newman's curacy in the late Twen-
ties ; the old church bore no cuniculous simili-
tude. In the new church, still extant, and notable
as one of the few English synagogues where
sermons are still emitted in black gown, Newman
never officiated ; its Pastor for many years was
]. W. Hughes, of Trinity, whose family of capti-
vating daughters filled on Sunday the spacious
vicarage pew. He took private pupils to read for
Matriculation ; when two of these had successively
married his two eldest girls, he received the name
of "the judicious Hooker." He was a handsome,
well-dressed man, read the service rhetorically,
preached fine parish sermons. He was a hack
Saint's-Day preacher at St. Mary's, earning five
guineas by the delivery of an old sermon to a
church quite empty except for the Vice-Chancellor
and Bedels. When Isaac Williams came up to
reside as Trinity Tutor, he made a duty of
attending all University sermons, to the discom-
fiture of Hughes, who said to Tommy Short one
day, " I wonder what Williams admires in my
sermons ; he is the only University man who
attends them ; it is highly complimentary, but
puts me to the trouble of looking out sermons
appropriate to the days." The system was after-

SJ

From an Engraving after a Water-Colout belonging to the Family

WALK ABOUT ZION 289

wards altered : poor Hughes, his daughters, and
his sermons, delevit aetas.

It was in the old church that J. H. Newman
served his first curacy under the octogenarian
antiquary John Gutch, Registrar of the University,
editor of Anthony Wood, author of " Collectanea
Curiosa." Newman in his letters to his sister
depicts gratefully the valuable assistance rendered
by the old Rector's daughters ; Sarah, the youngest,
lived to her ninetieth year, the most efficient visitor
of the poor in Oxford. For her last ten years
she was bedridden when I saw her shortly
before her death, in 1882, she told me how the
aged Cardinal, visiting Oxford, had climbed to
her room and sat long beside her bed, affec-
tionately recalling old times and people. From
church and turnpike you passed the bridge, the
Physic Garden open on your left ; for the resi-
dence built by Daubeny had not then risen, and
the Professor, Dr. Williams, lived in the house
facing Rose Lane. Water-carts were not as yet
invented, and in very dry weather the street was
irrigated from its five or six fire-plugs — we re-
member Mr. Bouncer's F.P. 7 ft. — commencing
at Magdalen elms. A sheet of canvas with a
wooden frame was laid across the gutter, and
the water turned on until it swelled into a pool,
then with curious dexterity dashed in all direc-
tions by a bare-legged Aquarius, with the aid of
an enormous wooden shovel. The gate of Mag-
dalen was Jacobaean, of debased style, but more
stately and more in harmony with the College
than any of its successors ; adjoining it was a

T

290 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

remnant of the old Magdalen Hall, used as the
choristers' school, with a modern cottage inhabited
by the College manciple Stephens. He was the
most Waltonian of Oxford anglers, my guide on
many an occasion to the waters of Cherwell,
Upper Isis, Windrush, knowing every spot where
a skilfully dropped "gudgin" would capture perch
or pike. Where Magdalen schoolroom now stands,
was the Greyhound inn. Under one of the trees
sat always an apple - faced old woman, Mother
Jeffs, selling tarts and fruits, last of a famous
sisterhood whose names and effigies survive out
of the hoary past. There was Mother Louse,
whose portrait by Loggan is a prize to print col-
lectors, the latest woman in England to wear a
ruff ; Mother George, who at more than a hundred
years old would, on payment of a shilling, thread
a needle without spectacles; Mother Goose the
flower-seller, pictured by Dighton in a coloured
drawing which I reproduce; her contemporary Nell
Batchelor, pie- woman, an epitaph to whose ''pie-
house memory " was inscribed by a forgotten wit —

" Here under the dust is the mouldering crust

Of Eleanor Batchelor shoven,
Well versed in the art of pie, custard, and tart,
And the lucrative skill of the oven.

When she'd lived long enough, she made her last puff,

A puff by her husband much praised ;
Now here she doth lie, and makes a dirt pie,

In the hope that her crust may be raised."

From Coach and Horse Lane to the Angel
stretched a great block of shops, swept away to

HER LOUSE, of LOUSE.

MAIA,,mrar OXF OHU .

> army Jleu {&. j-c liAe a I

'•2nt/iir'f6a/mrtfrtn?a>in A f
^berrtff. fafau** >nj- Xcf& artfaUt
Js ttuftne,*-ratm) ^ IrtTF ytu
)citf ffrafU/mciAerjvu sfsiyr
JEnoraved from the Original Print

u ?ba&

by David. Loggan Price 7-6.

MOTHER LOUSE
From the Line Engraving after Loggan

WALK ABOUT ZION 291

make room for the new Schools. The corner
house was tenanted by James, a confectioner, cook
of Alban Hall, where the traditional dinner grace
ran, "For what James allows us make us truly
thankful " ; another exhibited the graceful plaster
casts of Guidotti, an Italian image-seller, with an
extremely handsome English wife. The Angel was
the fashionable hotel ; the carriages and four of
neighbouring seigneurs, Dukes of Marlborough
and Buckingham, Lords Macclesfield, Abingdon,
Camoys, dashed up to it ; there, too, stopped all
day post-chaises, travelling chariots, equipages of
bridal couples, coaches from the eastern road ;
all visitors being received at the hall door by the
obsequious manager Mr. Bishop, in blue tail-coat
gilt-buttoned and velvet-collared, buff waistcoat,
light kerseymere pantaloons, silk stockings and
pumps, a gold eyeglass pendent from a broad
black ribbon ; escorted by Wallace, a huge mastiff,
who made friends with every guest. All of it
has vanished except the spacious coffee-room,
which became Cooper's shop. The Old Bank
stood where now it stands, already some twenty
years old. It was founded by two tradesmen —
Thompson, a gunsmith, and Parsons, a draper,
the latter brother to Dr. Parsons, Master of Balliol
and Bishop of Peterborough. Passing gallantly
through the money panic of 1825, when Walter
Scott was ruined and half the banks in England
broke, it rose into high repute, obtained the de-
posits of all the Colleges, and retains probably
most of them to-day under the grandsons of its
founders. Close to it were Vincent's Rooms, the

292 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

home of the Union, whose debates were held in
a hall behind Wyatt's picture shop. In 1835 the
house of Wood, the apothecary, at the entrance
to Skimmery Hall Lane, was translated into
Spiers', now itself extinct, but for nearly sixty
years inseparable from Oxford life, better served
and more artistic in its merchandise than any
shop in England. Its display of papier mache'
and of ceramic ware, surrounding a beautiful
cardboard model of the Martyrs' Memorial, was
one of the features in the 1851 Exhibition.

There were in the High two superior con-
fectioners, Jubber's and Sadler's, where white-hatted
Christchurch dandies lounged and ate ices in the
afternoons. The principal tailor was Joy, in a
large shop opposite Wadham. He was denominated
Parson Joy, having been met in the Long Vacation
travelling on the Continent with his brother, as

Captain and the Rev. Joy. He bequeathed his

book debts to one of his daughters ; they amounted
to ^4000, and she used to say that every penny
was recovered. The two large booksellers were
Talboys, in the handsome pillared shop opposite
St. Peter's Church, and Joseph Parker, in the Turl,
whose management of the Bible Press had converted
a heavy debt into .£100,000 of profit, and who had
lately made a hit by publishing two unassuming
and anonymous little volumes, destined, as "The
Christian Year" — "The Sunday Puzzle" Sydney
Smith called it — to achieve unprecedented popu-
larity. Its success was a surprise both to Keble
and his friends. Isaac Williams, to whom he had
shown it, did not admire it. Froude feared that

MVTHER GOOSE of OXFORD

MOTHER GOOSE

From a Coloured Lithograph by Dighton

WALK ABOUT ZION 293

people reading it would take the author for a
Methodist. So careless of it was Keble, that he
lost the little red book into which it was written,
and it was printed from a copy he had given to
Rickards of Oriel. "It will be still-born/' said
he, as he left the manuscript with Baxter ; " I
publish it only in obedience to my father's wishes."
The chief wine merchant was Latimer, a tall,
gentlemanlike, handsome man, with a fine house
on Headington Hill. One of his stories deserves
recital. A county magnate, notorious for his
meanness, had ordered six dozen of a fine brown
sherry, which he sent back by-and-by, minus one
bottle, with a message that the Duke had tried the
wine and disapproved of it. lt Put it back," said
Latimer to his cellarer, " and we'll call it the Duke's
wine." Entertaining a party at luncheon soon
after, he narrated the incident, and proposed that
they should try the wine. Up came a bottle ; the
guests smelt, tasted, looked at one another, said
nothing, till Latimer's glass was filled. It was toast
and water ; so was the whole binn : the bottles had
been opened, the wine drawn off, the simpler fluid
substituted.

Crossing from the Old Bank into Cat Street, you
might read in large letters on the All Souls wall
"No Bristol Riots," painted there in 1831. Ten
years ago it was still visible in certain conditions of
sunlight. The squalid cottages in Cat Street had
not been long pulled down, and the Radcliffe
surrounded with railings. By this last adornment
hangs a tale. The outer walls of Brasenose and
Lincoln exactly touch one another in Brasenose

294 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Lane ; you may walk from the Brasenose gate
opposite the Radcliffe to Lincoln gate in the Turl
without taking your hand from the masonry. It
was in the days when, after dinner, gentlemen
became unsteady in their walk; when the joyous
closing stave of Maginn's "Ode to a Bottle of
Old Port"—

" How blest are the tipplers whose heads can outlive

The effects of four bottles of thee ;
But the next dearest blessing that heaven can give
Is to stagger home muzzy with three" —

was quoted with approval and from experience
round many a mahogany tree ; and it is easy to
understand how opportune to a wine-cheered
veteran would be the continuous support and
guidance open to him so long as, like Pyramus, he
should "draw near the wall." A jovial club, the
bibulous champions of either College, dined
mutually at Lincoln or at Brasenose on a day in
alternate weeks, confidingly hugging the wall as
they reeled home from gate to gate. One night it
blew a hurricane, and as the Brasenose detachment
threaded the opening of the lane just under Bishop
Heber's tree, they were met by so furious a gust
that they lost hold of the wall and were blown into
the open. Struggling in the pitchy darkness to
recover their lost stay, they were brought up against
the unrailed Radcliffe. Joyously they resumed their
progress ; occasional suspicion that the way was
long floated through their muddy brains ; but port
wine, deranging reason, leaves faith undisturbed,
and on they went. The night was on the wane,
and at break of day the early coaches sweeping

WALK ABOUT ZION 295

past beheld a procession of vinous seniors, cap and
gown awry, slowly following their leader in single
file round and round the Radcliffe. So the railings
arose, and repetition of the feat became impossible.
Inside Brasenose, in the centre of the Quad, was a
curiosity long since removed : the stone figure of a
man bestriding a prostrate foe, and raising a mighty
jawbone for the death blow. " Cain and Abel "
it was called — " Cain taking A-bePs-life, his Sunday
Paper," was the current joke ; and undergraduates
after wines would clamber on to the fratricide's
shoulder. Mark Pattison relates how his father,
caught there one night by Tutor Hodson, answered
his angry challenge by a quotation from Aristo-
phanes, and so Apollo saved him. The Post Office
was in Queen Street, removed afterwards to the
corner of Bear Lane, to be burned down early one
Sunday morning in 1842. I remember the intro-
duction of the Fourpenny Post in 1839, followed by
the Penny Post in 1840, with black Queen's head,
stamped envelopes having silken threads let into
the paper, or Mulready's graceful device.

Restored Balliol and Trinity, with the unhar-
monious appendage to New College Slipe, are
recent alterations. In 1839, the Martyrs' Memo-
rial replaced a picturesque but tottering old house,
and the enlargement of St. Mary Magdalen's spoiled
a well-proportioned church. Jacob Ley, the Vicar,
used to say that a sermon as delivered to the right
or left of a certain pillar near the pulpit was
absolutely inaudible to worshippers on the corre-
sponding side of it, so that one discourse symmetri-
cally aimed would serve two Sundays. The Taylor

196 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Buildings came a little later, on the site of a lofty
edifice, once a mansion, afterwards decayed, and
let out in poverty-stricken tenements. The four
colossal female statues surmounting its eastern side
were declared by an imaginative undergraduate to
be effigies of four ladies who lived hard by ; and
the myth obtained a more than humorous accept-
ance. In St. John's gardens, sacred to Capability
Brown, still grew a crooked maple tree planted by
Archbishop Laud ; and the lines in the portrait of
Charles I. in the library, inscribing the Psalms of
David, were clearly legible with a magnifying glass.
Houses were nowhere then numbered, and the
names of streets were traditional. Not till 1838
was Coach and Horse Lane nomenclatured into
Merton Street, Magpie Lane into Grove Street,
Skimmery Hall Lane into Oriel Street, Butcher Row
into Queen Street, Pennyfarthing Lane into Pem-
broke Street, Fish Street into St. Aldate's, Titmouse
Lane into Castle Street ; while Bridge Street from
Magdalen Bridge to East Gate was incorporated
into High Street. Only Logic Lane, quoted in the
Spectator, as commemorating mediaeval combats,
not always of words alone, between Nominalists
and Realists, no one was profane enough to change.
The Parks, so called because the Parliamentary
cannon were planted there in the siege of Oxford,
was a large ploughed field, divided by a gravel
walk, bounded on the west by market gardens, on
the east by a high broad hedge, beyond which lay
the Cherwell meadows ; a haven to nursemaids and
their charge, the daily constitutional of elderly,
inactive Dons. The earthworks of the siege are

WALK ABOUT ZION 297

marked in Loggan. The lines are clearly traceable
to-day in Symonds' field, and the remains of a
bastion exist in a small coppice near the Clifton
Laboratory.

When the new Museum was opened two houses
sprang up just beyond its northern limit, inhabited
by Commander Burrows and Goldwin Smith, hence
known as Pass and Class. They were vaunt-couriers
to a tremendous irruption ; to the interminable
streets of villadom, converging insatiably protu-
berant upon distant Wolvercot and Summertown.
I cannot frame to pronounce them Oxford ; but
they suggest to me a momentous query. Nine-
tenths of their denizens, I am told, are married
Professors, Tutors, Fellows; men who formerly
lived in College, resident and celibate and pastoral.
The sheep live there still ; who shepherds them ?
Are they successfully autonomous, or controlled by
deputy shepherds whose own the sheep are not,
or a happy hunting ground for the grim wolf with
privy paw ? The old monastic Oxford has evapo-
rated into the Ewigkeit ; as I pace the Norham Gar-
dens and the Bradmore Road, leafy thoroughfares
of the bewildering New Jerusalem, I wonder what
system has supplanted Zion's, and with what bear-
ing on discipline and morals ? I do not prejudge
the answer : I question, like Bassanio, in pure
innocence ; not croaking sinistrous from my Pylian
ilex. But as the old glide down the inevitable
slope, their present becomes a living over again the
life which has gone before, and the future takes the
shape of a brief lengthening of the past. To me
Oxford, the venerable stones of which I love as

29 8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Newman loved the fading willow leaves in Christ-
church Meadow, must remain cis-paradisean Oxford,
Oxford southward of the Parks, Oxford of the Thirties
and the Forties, the Oxford which in these annalistic
chronicles I have set myself to recover and re-
people. To Oxonians of to-day they will appeal
perhaps with something of prehistoric dignity ; it
may seem suitable that the fading lineaments of a
time so different from their own should be portrayed
by one, well-nigh the last, of those who drew from
them the inspiration of his own youthful dreams
and fancies ; and some, at least, among the young
Patrocli who are there beginning life will join
hands filially and affectionately across the chasm
of three score and eighteen years with the time-
worn commemorative NESTOR who must ere
long resign it.

SIT FINIS FANDI.

APPENDICES

BRASENOSE ALE

By THOMAS DUNBAR, Fellow of Brasenose, and Keeper of the
Ashmolean Museum

(Seep. 12.)

All ye, who round the buttery hatch
Eager await the opening latch

Our barrels to assail,
Come, listen, while in pleasing gibe
The rare ingredients I describe

Which float in Brasenose Ale.

Guiltless alike of malt and hop,
Our buttery is a druggist's shop

Where quassia's draughts prevail ;
Alum the muddy liquor clears,
And mimic wormwood's bitter tears

Compose our Brasenose Ale.

All ye who physic have professed,
Sir Kit l and Poticary West,2

Your practice gone bewail !
The burning mouth, the temple's throb,
Sick stomach, and convulsive sob,

Are cured by Brasenose Ale.

1 Sir Kit — Sir Christopher Pegge, p. 62. 2 Poticary West, p, 64.

299

300 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

As poisons other poisons kill,
So, should we with convivial skill

Old Syms's 1 wine assail,
Or Latimer's immortal tun,
"Herbert" yclept or " Abingdon,"

We're cured by Brasenose Ale.

The fair Cheltenia's opening salt
Must yield to our factitious malt ;

What double sconce 2 can fail ?
But, if you want some tonic stuff,
You readily will find quant : suff :

A gill of Brasenose Ale.

Mysterious as the Sibyl's leaves
The battels are which each receives j

But, freshmen, cease to rail !
You're fed and physicked ; in your bills
Each week is vinegar of squills,

Bark, salts, and Brasenose Ale.

Oh that our Bursar would consent
To give the bottled porter vent,

Porter beloved by Dale ; 8
Smuggled no more by Joey's 3 stealth,
It would improve the College health,

Well scoured by Brasenose Ale.

1 Syms and Latimer, wine merchants, p. 293.

2 A double sconce was a fine for improprieties in Hall ; the culprit
was compelled to drink a gallon of ale.

3 Rev. Joseph Dale and Joseph Hodgkinson, Fellows of the College
addicted to Double X.

APPENDICES 301

My muse, a half reluctant prude,

In dudgeon vile George Smith 1 pursued,

Afraid his verse should fail ;
When next the annual Ode he woos,
May he invoke a different Meux,

'T improve our Brasenose Ale.

B

ODE,

RECITED ON THE ANNIVERSARY DINNER OF THE CHESS
CLUB, BY THE LAUREATE, THOMAS DUNBAR.

(Seep. 12.)

From the bright burning lands and rich forests of Ind,

See the form of Caissa arise ;
In the caverns of Brahma no longer confined,

To the shores of fair Europe she flies.

A figure so fair through the region of light

All natives with wonder survey,
As her varying mantle now darkens with night,

Now beams with the silver of day.

Let Whist, like the bat, from such splendour retire,
A splendour too strong for his eyes ;

The Trump and Odd Trick let dull Av'rice admire,
Entrapped by so paltry a prize.

Can Finesse and the Ten-Ace e'er hope to prevail
When Reason opposes her weight,

When inviolate Majesty hangs in the scale,
And Castles yet tremble with fate ?

1 He was the College porter.

302 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

When the bosom of Beauty the throbbing heart meets,

And Caissa's the gay Valentine,
What Chessman, who'd tasted such amorous sweets,

His Mate but with life would resign ?

But 'tis o'er — Terebinth x the decision approves,
And Whist has contended in vain ;

To the Mansion of Hades the Genius removes,
Where he gnaws his own counters in pain.

On Philosophy's brow a new lustre unfolds,

Mild reason exults in the birth ;
His creation benign Father Tuckwell beholds,

And Steph 2 gives the chaplet to Mirth.

HENRY MATTHEWS

(Note to page 13.)

Henry Matthews well deserves a notice. His father,
Colonel Matthews, was the owner of a beautiful seat called
Belmont, on the Wye, in Herefordshire, Colonel of Militia
and long M.P. for the county ; a sapling planted by him
in 1788 is still called Colonel Matthews' oak. In his old
age Henry was wont to attend on him to bed each night,
where as his head settled into the pillow he repeated always
in his Herefordshire dialect the same complacent formula,
" I tell yer — 'Enery — I thinks — the most comfortablest
place in the world is bed — fur — there ye forgets all yer
cares." One of the sons, Charles Skynner Matthews, was
the intimate Cambridge friend of Byron (Life by Moore,

1 " Terebinth " was a nickname for Lingard ; in a later edition it
reads " The decision old Lingard approves."

* Steph was Stephens, Fellow and Vice-Principal of Brasenose,
afterwards Rector of Belgrave, near Leicester.

APPENDICES 303

vol. i. p. 125), and was drowned in 1812. Another,
Arthur, I knew well as a Canon of Hereford and Senior
Fellow of Brasenose ; Henry was the third. At Eton he
was a reckless madcap, driving tandem through the town,
and once lighting a bonfire on the floor of Long Chamber.
He became a Fellow of King's; his health broke down,
he travelled, publishing in 1820 his "Diary of an Invalid,"
which reached a fifth edition. In 1821 he was appointed
Advocate Fiscal of Ceylon, married Emma Blount, of
Orleton Manor, Herefordshire, and sailed for India ;
passing through Oxford on his way to Southampton,
and leaving for my father, who was away, a touching
letter of farewell, which I possess. He became Judge
in 1827, and died on May 2oth, 1828. His son is the
present Lord Llandaff.

D

THE LETTER H

(Seep. 67.)

I insert the original for the sake of comparison. Its
authorship was doubted at the time, and it was assigned
to Lord Byron. Lady Stanley, in her " Early Married
Life," gives Miss Fanshawe's appropriation of it : — " I
do give it under my hand and seal this i2th day of
February, 1819, that to the best of my belief the Enigma
of the Letter H was composed, not by the Right Honour-
able George Lord Byron, but by me, Catherine Maria
Fanshawe."

'Twas in heaven pronounced — it was muttered in hell,
And Echo caught faintly the sound as it fell.
On the confines of earth 'twas permitted to rest,
And the depths of the ocean its presence confessed.

304 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

'Twill be found in the sphere when 'tis riven asunder,

Be seen in the lightning, and heard in the thunder ;

'Twas allotted to man with his earliest breath,

Attends at his birth and awaits him in death,

Presides o'er his happiness, honour, and health,

Is the prop of his house, and the end of his wealth.

In the heaps of the miser 'tis hoarded with care,

But is sure to be lost on his prodigal heir.

It begins every hope, every wish it must bound,

With the husbandman toils, and with monarchs is

crowned.

Without it the soldier, the seaman, may roam,
But woe to the wretch who expels it from home.
In the whispers of conscience its voice will be found,
Nor e'en in the whirlwind of passion is drowned :
It will soften the heart, and, though deaf be the ear,
It will make it acutely and instantly hear.
Yet in shade let it rest like a delicate flower :
Ah ! breathe on it softly — it dies in an hour !

E
CHARLES WORDSWORTH

(Seep. 87.)
EPITAPH ON HIS WIFE, IN WINCHESTER CHAPEL.

I, nimium dilecta, vocat Deus, I, bona nostrae
Pars animae ; mcerens altera, disce sequi.

Translated by Lord Derby.

Too dearly loved, thy God hath called thee ; go,
Go, thou best portion of this widowed heart :

And thou, poor remnant lingering here in woe,
So learn to follow, as no more to part.

APPENDICES 305

CHARLES WORDSWORTH
INSCRIPTION IN THE GRIMSEL HOTEL BOOK

, «r0ietv, iriveiv, TraXiv

v
6pPp6(f>opov a>s ra TrXeio-ra Svcr^pflv Ata,

3 6 /3lOTO<S lo-Tl TW1>

Translated : —

To walk, to sleep, to eat, to drink,

To cry, " How lovely, don't you think ? "

To wield a six foot alpenstock,

Talk French, write name in Grimsel book,

To curse the rain's incessant pour;
The pleasures these of foreign tour.

DRAMATIS PERSONS OF THE "BOTHIE"

(Seep. 98.)

Hobbes was certainly Ward Hunt, afterwards First Lord of

the Admiralty.
Lindsay ', the "Piper," was F. Johnson of Christchurch,

with some touches of W. H. Da vies.
Airlie was probably Deacon of Oriel, who joined Clough's

reading party in the year following.
Arthur Audley was Herbert Fisher of Christchurch, with,

say the Walronds, a touch of Theodore Walrond.
Philip Htwson was Clough himself, with some traits from

Winder of Oriel.

Adam was probably not a portrait, but not unlike Clough.
Hope cannot, I fear, be now identified.

U

306 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

SEPTEM CONTRA CAMUM
(Seep. 113.)

i. Vacant.

ii. Robert Menzies, University.
iii. Edward Royds, Brasenose.
iv. William B. Brewster, St. John's.
v. George D. Bourne, Oriel.
vi. John C. Cox, Trinity.
vii. Richard Loundes, Christchurch.
viii. George E. Hughes, Oriel.
Coxswain. Arthur T. W. Shadwell, Balliol.

H
FRAGMENTA E CODICE BAROCCIANO1

" Insanientem navita Bosphorum"

— Tentabo. HORAT. Od. III., iv. 30.

EXCUDEBAT W. BAXTER, OXONII

The origin of this clever skit is given on p. 169.
Its charm lies in the dexterous rendering into Homeric
Greek of Oxford names and witticisms.

MONITUM
TWO fragments, Fragmenta duo, quse in nobilissimo Codice apud

agfe pS^ent- Bibliothecam Bodleianam evolvendo nuper detexi, re-
th'e Bod"eianin ligi°ms duxi non primo quoque tempore publici juris
facere. Auctoris nomen desideratur; colorem tamen
vere Homericum habent. Adjeci ea quae inter legendum

1 Where these jeux d'esprit are in a dead language I have
appended a translation or short paraphrase.

APPENDICES

3°7

mihi occurrebant, turn ex aliis auctoribus, turn e con-
jectura petita : sed perfunctorie et currente calamo
omnia, ut reliquias vere aureas quam citissime cum
eruditis communicarem.

Dabam Oxonii, Prid. Cal. Graec. cio . ID . ccc . xxxiv.
Imprimatur, Wellington, Cancellarius.

I.— E PROCEMIO, UT VIDETUR

etSe Ota <£#«ri/A/:?poTOV,
avSpas aptcrrrjas Trepl jSoWopov
Ilao-as Se M^u^as, Kal 'laova? e
Meprwvas 0' erapovs, Ka^eSp^v 0' ocrot a/i(£tve/jiovTcu,

T OIKOVO- v6

, ZvOa KeXfvBoi

T', aet yevo? a
e Mere^erepovs epiS

II.— CATALOGI FRAGMENTUM

Sa:r€<$(£ 8' GKarepOev laovas

j Kal Xei/xaros aAAos
, /zet^wv, (rrt/Sapwrepo? Iv

dpVVfJ>€VOL 'ApOoVplOV LTTiroSafJLOLO'

Meprwvos 8' erapovs, Kparepwv a-rt^as ao-7ricrTao>v,

^Soryv aya^os Kooyx^crev "EAetos*
8' aywv o#i IT^AeiSea) ra^avro ^xxAayycs.
BaAAtoAets S' Tyyev 6e6(f>w M^crrwp ajaAavros,

3. 'Idopas, St. John's. A/cex^rwvaj, Zfow. //. xiii. 685.

5. Fi;0r^>y, Worcester.

8. Mere^eT^/Jous, Exeter.
10. Xet)u,a/>, Wynter, President of St. John's.
12. <£/»rXeoy, Wintle, Senior Fellow of St. John's.
15. "EXeios, marshy, Marsham, Warden of Merton,
1 6. IfyXefSew, supporters of Peel.
17. MTJO-TW/), the Master.

3o8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

M^o-rcop, os /xi/c/)bs /xev erjv 8e/xas, dAAa /xa^T^s'

owo/xa 8' Icr^ev a/xcr/oov, d^ea^a-rov, ovS' dvo/xaoToV

T<£ 8' ap eirovO' eKarbv Kat TTCVTC /xeAatvo^irwves. 20

Dr. Fox leads 'AAX* OiOlO'tl' CCl/aCTCr' ap%7]y€Tl<S €<TTt ^lAlTJTnj
Queen's. ,~ ,- /, „ . /» v, v «, t v ,

TOtOrtO€ <Po£oS €T]V K€(pdA.Y) ' 6KO.TOV 6 V7TO TOVTO)

•i^yowes KocrprjOev fS' oySwKovra Bopeiot.
Dr. Bridges leads 'AAX" au vw, vatovo-tv oVoi Tpta KdwTTra KaKLcrra,

vjpus ^yejaovev' eiSws iroXepOLo Fe^v/oas, 25

dySca/covr' apiO^ KCU aTravras <^>ato)(tT(uvas,
JAAX' otrot ets KaOeSpyv Trcpl ~B6cnropov rj
(fj,a.KpY)v a/x^)t€7rovT€9 ara^TrtTov, ov TO,

Dean Gaisford, XappeXov rjS 'IcrtS (TV/X/^aA
wielding two ,,^/v »>J\P> / o,)>>t/

mighty lexica, 17 OtTTvAcOTOS tt/5 €OTTl, Ot^KOCTtOt 0 ttV €KaCTTf]V
leads Christ- « jt ^\\'

church. ave/)€s €^otxi/€1)<rt AiAcuojtzevoi

, os a/xi'^trt trrt^as
oiTrep ov Bvo y* avSpe IScc
rAatev aTap/xvKTOicrt TrpocrwTracri, cr^juaTa Avy/oa 35

otot vvv PporoL ti(T> , 6 8e /xtv pea TraAAe /cat oTos.

Dr. Macbride Ot 8* ATTO/xaySaAta? K\€Lvfj SdlVVVTai €V 'AvA^,

len Hall.ag & ^ots /xeya or^/xaivwv apa/3r](rev 6 IIa/>0evo7ratos'
T^> 8' a/>a 7T€vnJKOv0J eurovro /xcAatvoxiTcovcs.

^^vea 8' dvOputTTiav ^aA/cevrepa, ^aAKOTrpdcrwTra, 40
Dr. Gilbert leads 8ioyevr)s FtA/^/JTos ayev TroAAot 8' V

Brasenose. t\/ r> \/^>/ v/i \v/»

OTrAiras pao-tA^es €Koa-/xeov evfla Kat evt^a-

1 8. otfvoiJ.a K. r. X., the uncouth name Jenkyns.

21. $i\iinrr], Queen Philippa, Foundress of Queen's.

22. $6£os, Fox, Provost of Queen's.

23. Bopeioi, the Scholars and Fellows of Queen's, mostly from
northern counties.

24. Tpia KdTTTra, C. C. C., Corpus, KdKHrra, referring to a proverb
— the three bad C's — Cappadocians, Cicilians, Cretans.

25. ye<j>vpa$, Bridges, President of Corpus.

33. Xe£t*&, Suidas and Etymologicon Magnum.
35. &Tapfj,vKToi<n, unwinking.

38. napflej/oTratos, Macbride. &pdpi)<rev— he was Professor of
Arabic.

41. JTiX/Seprds, Gilbert, Head of Brasenose,

APPENDICES

ots ^)€/oeTat XaAKOvs SetVoto TreAw/oov,
(oSJjua J3p6roi<s €/>iSo
6p&b<s CTT' £yxe"?S> Tre/n
T(3vSe St^Koo-tot TroAe/xoVSe /cat etKoo~t /3atvoi>.

SveuSet 8' €L7r6fJL€v
CTTT' «rav oy/xowv SeKaScs, 8ta <^V
Ilacrwi/ IK ^v^wi/ l^BiporaTOL KOL apterrot,

JE/< 8e KaTr^Xetov Kpa/x^/otos 5/oro Neoto,
U Kat avrb yAwcrcr7^s /xeXtros yAvKtwv peei/ avS?)
Trtpvcri Srjfioio TravyyvptL a,K/oiTOjav#<£).
eryv 8' era/awv, Tra/Gpos T€ ot IcrTrero
Tovs 8e MeTe^eTepovs 6 MaptAat8i^s ay* '
f3X.ocrvpoi<Ti TT/oocrwTraatv ITTTTOKO^O

' o? X^^ ^^ BOCTTTO/OOV a
e'x€l/5 'H^aKrrov Texvaoyxara, ^ecrKeAa e^oya,
Jiv r/36a /xev x/3^0"^) T/ota 8' apyvpo^Aa T€TVKTO,
8wKe Se Boo"7ro/otots /3acriAe{i(rtv 6 KvAAoTroSt'wv
TToAAotcrt v^eo-a-t Kat ao-ret Travrt avacrcreii/.
TOVS jw-ev ayev 7roAe/xov8'' aAAovs 8' OI'KOI
retxea (frpovpovvras Kat CTraA^tas
ij/xtcru yap TCTeAecrro, TO 8' rjfjucrv yv/xvov €\€L<f>@r].

45

Mr. Sneyd lea
All Souls.

Dr. Cramer lef
New Inn H:

Dr. Collier Joi
leads Exet
preceded
five " Pokei

60

64

43. My/cTTjp XaXxoGs 7re\c6/)ou, the brazen nose over the gate.

47. Sveu5#, Sneyd, Warden of All Souls, noted for his long
neck and corresponding white tie.

51. Kpa/w^ptos, Cramer, Principal of New Inn Hall.

55. M.api\at8tjs 'Iw^ei)s, Collier Jones, Rector of Exeter.

58. ffXijirrpa, the bedel's staves ; he was Vice- Chancellor.

60. Ki/XXo7ro5W, lame-foot, Vulcan.

64. Buildings must have been going on at Exeter, probably the
Turl front.

The following lines about Shuttle worth were appar-
ently never printed, but handed round in writing with
copies of the printed piece.

'Av8/DWi/ 8' OVK ^

'A£toKe/>KtV

Dr. Shutt!
worth (p. i(
with his <
on a bishop:
stands apart

310 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

I
OXFORD1

(Seep. 1450

O'er Oxford's halls the dewy hand of night

Sows the still heavens with gems of lustrous light,

Earth sinks to rest, and earthly passions cease,

And all is love, and poesy, and peace.

How soft o'er Wykeham's aisle and Waynflete's tower

Falls the mild magic of the midnight hour ;

How calm the classic city takes her rest,

Like a hushed infant on its mother's breast !

How pure, how sweet, the moonbeam's silver smile

Serenely sleeps on fair St. Mary's aisle,

And lends each sculptured saint a chastened glow,

Like the calm glory of their lives below.

Now, stilled the various labours of the day,

Student and Don the drowsy charm obey,

E'en Pusey owns the soft approach of sleep,

Long as his sermons, as his learning deep :

Peaceful he rests from Hebraistic lore,

And finds that calm he gave so oft before.

Lo ! where on peaceful Pembroke beams the moon,

Delusive visions lull the brains of Jeune ;

Slowly he finds in sleep's serene surprise

The mitred honours which the world denies ;

Dreams of a see from earthly care withdrawn,

And one long sabbath of eternal lawn.

[Lacuna valde deflenda, sed ne in antiquissimo quidem
codice suppleta.]

1 Composed by W. W. Merry, Alfred Blomfield, Charles Bo wen,
and J. W. Shephard, all of Balliol.

Given to Mr. Madan in 1885 by J. R. King of Oriel, who was
present at the composition, and himself contributed a few words. To
Mr. Madan's kindness I owe this copy, and other valuable help.

APPENDICES 311

See fresh from Eton sent, the highborn dunce,
So late a boy, now grown a man at once :
Proud, he asserts his new-found liberty,
And slopes in triumph down the astonished High.
Mark the stiff wall of collar at his neck,
More fit to choke the wearer than to deck ;
And the long coat which, dangling at his heels,1
His " bags " of varied colour scarce reveals.
So, when the infant hails the birthday grant
Of gracious grandmother or awful aunt,
Forth from the ark of childhood, one by one,
The peagreen patriarch leads each stalwart son ;
O'er Noah's knees descends the garment's hem,
And clothes in solid folds the shins of Shem,
His ligneous legs in modesty conceals,
And two stout stumps alone to view reveals.
Pleased with the sight, the infant screams no more,
And groups his great forefathers on the floor ;
Sucks piety and paint from broad-brimmed Ham,
But thinks that even Japhet yields to jam.

J

ON CHANTREY'S CHILDREN IN
LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL

(Seep. 153.)
OSBORNE GORDON.

'A Motpa a Kpvepa TW KaAu) 7rai6° '

TJpTra&e' TWV KaXwv TIS KOpos €<r@' "
"AAXa (TV y 'AyyeXta, roy arjSea pvdov

1 The long ulster-like coats which came in just then (in 1856) are
alluded to.

312 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Ae£oi/ 8', <o SCU/AOV, rav KaXav wA,«ras aypav,

ov yap ras ^xas, or8e ra
At ju,€i/ yap \{/v)(ai //.eTe/^crai

crco/mra 8' ev ycup v^y/oerov virvov e

May be thus translated, faithfully, not adequately :

Love's fairest twins cold Fate has rapt from earth :

Death craves each loveliest birth.
Go, thou, whose lore insculps the unpleasing word,

Go to the dark-realmed Lord.
Forbid him triumph ; — his the power to slay,

Not his to hold the prey.
Their forms unwaking sleep beneath the sod,

Their souls rest aye with God.

I transcribe from a copy given to me at the time
of its composition. In the "Anthologia Oxonensis" is an
altered reading of line 4, BCUTK', ?0i, irayKotrav ets 'AtSao
8o/x,ov, probably the latest correction of the author. Both
epithets are finely classical — jmeXavTeix*} Pindaric, TrayKoirav
Sophoclean. I append a translation, the best I can
render : it is quite inadequate as transmitting the old-
world feeling of the original, but it is nearly literal.
'AyyeXia, line 3, I have taken to mean the sad message
of death inscribed in the sculptured forms. The Dean
of Durham thinks that the somewhat tame last line (last
but one in the translation) shows inability on Gordon's
part to "get in" the thought he had — "the souls rest in
heaven, the bodies are immortalised in stone."

APPENDICES 313

K
CARMEN l

IN THEATRO SHELDONIANO

NON RECITATUM
VII. DIE JUNII, MDCCCLIII.

(See p. 154, in which the poem is paraphrased?)

Quern Virum aut Heroa lyra vel acri
Tibia sumis celebrare, Clio ?
Scilicet quern te voluere Patres
Hebdomadales.

Te decet jussum properare carmen,
Ficta nam Phoebus patitur, tuisque
Laudis indignse fidibus canoris
Dedecus aufert.

Jamque dicatur gravis et decorus,
Et sibi constans memoretur idem,
Ille, qui multis superare possit
Protea formis.

Quin et insignem paribus catervam
Laudibus tollas, quibus, heu fatendum,
Ista de nobis hodie paratur

Pompa triumphi.

Plura si tangas, tacuisse velles ;
Vix enim linguae tulit eloquentis
Praemium, verbis relevare doctus
Praemia magnis.

1 By Osborne Gordon ; on the Installation of Lord Derby as
Chancellor.

3H REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Nee magis palmam meruit decoram
Ssevus in mitem, nimiumque vincens
Dulce ridentem Samuelis iram
Voce cruenta.1

His tamen constat decus omne nostri,
Hie Duci magno Comes advocatur,
Talibus flentes premimus tropaeis
Grande sepulchrum.

Deditis ergo gravis ille nobis
Partium tristem trahit hue ruinam,
Et rates obstat reparare quassas
Isidis unda.

Gaudeant istis pueri et puellae :
Mente diversa notat, et Theatri
Excipit vani sonitum maligno
Patria risu.

1 This refers to a passage between Lord Derby and Samuel, Bishop
of Oxford, during a debate on the Canada Clergy Reserves in the
House of Lords. The Bishop advocated their surrender; "Fiat
justitia, ruat cselum," he said. Provoked by his arguments, and by
the aggravating smile with which he met his own indignant attack,
Lord Derby quoted the line from Hamlet, " A man may smile, and
smile, and be a villain " (see p. 154).

APPENDICES 315

L

FACSIMILE OF THE "THUNNUS" PARODY
(Seep. 155.)

IN A CONGREGATION to be holden on Saturday, the 31st
instant, at Two o' Clock, the following form of Statute will be
promulgated.

F. JUNIUS,

Vice-Can.

UNIVERSITY CATACOMBS,
Nov. 3, 1860.

Placuit Universitati 2009.

In Epitaphio Thunni in Musaeo Academico depositi haec verba

THUNNUS QUEM VIDES

MENSE JANUARII A, S. MDCCCLVII

AB HENRICO W. ACLAND TUIMC TEMPORIS ANATOMIAE IN AEDE XTI. PRAELECTORE

EX MADEIRA INSULA

OUQ HENRICUM G. LIDDELL AEDIS XTI. DECANUM

INFIRMA VALETUDINE LABORANTEM DEDUXERAT

PRAETER OMNEM SPEM OXONIAM AOPORTATUS EST.

TYNA ENIM NAVE VAPORARIA IN QUA REDIBAT PRAELECTOR

AD SCTI. ALBANI PROMONTORIUM IN COMITATU DORSETIAE EJECTA,

QUUM IPSE VIX SOSPES E FLUCTIBUS EVASIT,
HIC PISCIS IN NAVE REUCTUS PER VOLUNTATEM NAUTARUM AD TERRAM ADVECTUS EST,

DEINDE IN MUSAEO AEDIS XTI. POSITUS •
PER ARTEM CAROLF ROBERTSON -ESKEAETETSH.

abrogare, et in eorum locum quse secjuuntur subrogare : —

THUNNUS QUEM RIDES

MENSE JUNII A. S. MDCCCLX

AB HENRICO W. ACLAND NUNC TEMPORIS MEDICINAE IN ACAD. OXON. PROFESSORS REGIO

EX MUSAEO ANATOMICO

DE QUO HENRICUM G. LIDDELL AEDIS XTI. DECANUM
AETERNA MANSUETUDINE PERORANS SEDUXERAT .
PRAETER OMNIUM SPEM OXONlENSIUM HUC ADPORTATUS EST.

ORATIONE ENIM VAPORARIA IN QUA GAUDEBAT PROFESSOR
AD SCTI ACLANDI GLORIAM IN CONGREGATIONEM DOCTISSIME INJECTA,

QUUM MUSAEUM IPSUM VIX SOSPES EX HOSTIBUS EVASIT,
HAEC AREA IGNAVE REFECTA PER SEGN1TATEM MAGISTRORUM AD FINEM PROVECTA EST,

QUAE IN MEDl'O AEDIFICiO POSITA
PER ARTEM BENJAMINI WOODWARD

316 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

M
THE STORY OF PHAETHON

By P. N. SHUTTLEWORTH
(Seep. 169.)

Once upon a time, so goes the tale,

The driver of a country mail,

One Phoebus, had a hare-brained son,

Called from his uncle Phaethon.

This boy, quite spoilt with over care

As many other children are,

All day, it seems, would cry and sputter

For gingerbread or toast and butter ;

And sure no father would deny

Such trifles to so sweet a boy.

But that which rules all earthly things

And coachmen warms as well as kings,

Ambition, soon began to reign

Sole tyrant in this youngster's brain ;

And, as we find in every state

The low will emulate the great,

As ofttimes servants drink and game

Because their lords have done the same,

The boy, now hardly turned of ten,

Would fain be imitating men ;

Till what, at last, must youngster do,

But drive the mail a day or two.

In vain with all a father's care

Old Phoebus tries to soothe his heir,

In vain the arduous task explains

To ply the lash and guide the reins,

Tells him the roads are deep and miry,

Old Dobbin's blind and Pyeball fiery ;

APPENDICES 317

At length he yields, though somewhat loath,

And seals his promise with an oath ;

The oath re-echoing as he sware

Like thunder shook his elbow chair,

Made every rafter tremble o'er him,

And spilt the ale that stood before him.

All then prepared in order due,

The coach 'brought out, the horses too,

Glad Phaethon with youthful heat

Climbs up the box and takes his seat,

And, scarce each passenger got in,

Drives boldly off through thick and thin.

Now whether he got on as well

The sequel of my tale will tell :

Scarce gone a mile the horses find

Their wonted driver left behind :

For horses, poets all agree,

Have common sense as well as we :

Nay, Homer tells us they can speak

Not only common sense, but Greek.

In vain our hero, half afraid,

Calls all his learning to his aid,

And runs his Houyhnhnm jargon through

Just as he'd heard his father do —

As " Gently Dobbin, Pyeball stay,

Keep back there Bobtail, softly, way ! "

The more he raved and bawled and swore,

They pranced and kicked and run the more

Till, driver and themselves to cool,

They lodged all safely in a pool.

Hence then, ye highborn bards, beware,

Nor spin your Pegasus too far,

From Phaethon's mischance be humble,

Go gently — or the jade will stumble.

P. N. SHUTTLEWORTH.

Winchester College, 1800.

3i 8 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

N

(Seep. 175.)

This is said to have been repeated impromptu by Foote
in order to puzzle Macklin, who boasted that he could
re-word any tale after once hearing it : —

"The baker's wife went into the garden for a cabbage
leaf to make an apple pie. A great she bear walking down
the street put its head into the shop : ' What, no soap ? '
So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber.
And there were present at the wedding the Piccalillies,
the Joblillies, the Gargulies, and the great Panjandrum
himself with the little round button on the top ; and
they all played at Catch-who-catch-can till the gunpowder
ran out of the heels of their boots."

o

(Seep. 194.)

Hie tandem invitus requiescit
GEORGIUS ILLE ARCHIDIACONUS DE TAUNTON

Qui vulgo
GEORGIUS SINE DRACONE

Audiebat,

Amicorum dum vivebat Delicise,

Whiggorum,

Radicalium,

Rationalistarum.

Gladstonophilorum.

Flagrum Indefessum, Acerrimum.

In Clericorum Convocatione

Facundissimus, Facetissimus.

In Baronibus

APPENDICES

Seu humanis et Hagleiocolis
Sive bovinis
Demoliendis,

In Feriis Autumnalibus apud East Brent
Conveniendis,
In denegando

De Ecclesia, De Republica,

De omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis,

In piscium venatione,

Nulli secundus.

Se ipso judice,

Erroris Expers,

Per Vices Rerum Quantaslibet
Immutatus et Immutabilis.

319

LYTTELTON Baro fecit. Jan., 1868.

A.D. 1910.

Here rests at last against his will

G. A. D.,

Known commonly as George-without-the-drag-on.

In life the delight of his friends ;

Of Whigs, Radicals, Gladstonians,

The unwearied scourge.

Eloquent in Convocation,

Unrivalled in social charm,

Keen Angler, universal Gainsayer,

In his own opinion faultless,
Unchangeable amid surrounding change.

BY LORD LYTTELTON, 1868.

320 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

,ngel ? No, Ape.

limbimg to the
tree-top, and
flinging the
fruit at his
enemies.

fith feigned
gravity emit-
ting claptrap.

'ith feigned
sorrow beat-
ing a gorrilla
breast.

ie religions and
devout? tell it
to his brother
Jew, Apelles.

DIZZY AND THE ANGELS

By CHARLES NEATE
(Note i, p. 199.)

At a meeting of the Oxford Diocesan Society in the
Theatre, November 25th, 1864, Bishop Wilberforce
presiding, Mr. Disraeli said : " What is the question now
placed before society with a glib assurance the most
astounding ? The question is this — Is man an ape or an
angel ? My lord, I am on the side of the angels."

Angelo quis te similem putaret
Esse, vel divis atavis creatum,
Cum tuas plane referat dolosus
Simius artes ?

Sive cum palma latitans in alta,
Dente quos frustra tetigit superbo
Dejicit fructus, nuceam procellam,
Tutus in hostem ;

Sive cum fictse gravitatis ore
Comico torquet dehonesta rictu
Turba quod risu, nimium jocosa,
Plaudat inepto.

Sive (quod monstrum tua novit aetas),
Cum furens intus rabie, feroque
Imminens bello, similis dolenti
Pectora plangit.

Scilicet verae pietatis ardor
Non tulit pressis cohibere labris
Fervidam vocem — tuus ille forsan
Credat Apella.

APPENDICES 321

Credidit certe plus ille noster Our " Sam "

, , ,. feigns belief,

Ore qui blando data verba reddit, but his tongue

,.T • * • ', • is in his saintly

Non pnus nobis ita visus esse cheek.
Credulus Oxon.

Q

Facsimile of letter to Charles. Girdlestone ("Com-
mentary" Girdlestone he was called), accompanying a
copy of the "Suggestions for an Association," written by
Palmer of Worcester, revised by Newman, and cor-
rected by Ogilvie. Girdlestone, whose answer follows, was
a leading Evangelical, and had recommended Newman
as a kindred spirit to his first curacy at St. Clement's.
These two letters are not published in Mr. Mozley's book.
They illustrate : (i) The wide extent of Newman's initial
propaganda, amongst extreme Low Churchmen no less than
in directions not inevitably hostile to the movement ; (2)
the confident, excited temper, and defiant objurgatory
language with which he embarked on his crusade ; (3) the
deep instinct of opposition felt from the first by weighty
theologians of the Clapham School, spreading and in-
creasing as the Tracts went on, though not culminating till
the publication of Tract 90.

322 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

APPENDICES 323

C. GIRDLESTONE'S ANSWER TO J. H. NEWMAN'S
LETTER

SEDGELY VICARAGE, DUDLEY,
6th Nov. 1833.

DEAR NEWMAN, — It gives me very great pain indeed to
differ so widely as I fear I do from you in the matter to
which your printed circular and written letter refer. Nor
do I like to say no to your application without assigning
one or two of the reasons which chiefly weigh with me.

1. Your objects are indistinctly denned. "Maintain in-
violate" looks very like to an Anti- Church- reform Society;
though your definition goes no further than I should gladly
go with you, being extremely averse to any change which
" involves the denial or suppression of doctrine " (sound
doctrine I conclude you mean) or "a departure," &c., &c.
I honestly assure you I could not be certain whether it is
your intent to promote any change at all, though I guess
from the tenor of the whole paper that almost any change
would be counted innovation.

2. Besides this indistinctness as to your principles, I am
at a loss to understand in what way they are to be prac-
tically applied : whether the publication of a periodical, the
influencing elections for M.P.'s, the putting yourselves
under the direction of a committee in all matters connected
with your first object, or the mere circulation of tracts.

3. I cannot approve of the feeling which pervades your
document, nor assent to the presumed data on which it
proceeds. The spirit of the times does not appear to me
in the same light as it does to you. And, the worse it is, I
am the more desirous that in the Church at least a good
spirit should be cultivated. Now, this whole paper breathes
a censorious, querulous, discontented spirit, a spirit of
defiance, unless I am much mistaken, to the party predomi-
nant at present in the State, a spirit which is the most likely

324 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

of all others to bring the Church into contempt with that
party, and, what is worse, a spirit which is thoroughly
opposite to the Christian rule of overcoming evil with good.

I have written the more freely because I cannot but
think it new and strange to you to write as you have
written about the Parliament, &c., and I hope you may be
disposed to weigh the grounds on which I have come to
conclusions so opposite to yours. I regard the men at
present in power as no worse Christians than their pre-
decessors, counting no doctrine worse than that which
sacrifices the morality of the people on the shrine of finance
and expediency. (See Beer bill, appointment of Philpotts
to be Bishop, defence of the venality of votes in elections,
multiplication of oaths at Custom House, &c., &c.) I
count them to be entitled to our respect because they are
in power; and, without being as I trust a Vicar of Bray, I
cannot comprehend how you reconcile the names you call
the Parliament with the prayer you daily use for its pros-
perity. The many grievous faults which as a Christian I
cannot help seeing in many of their measures (not more
than in those of their predecessors) make me the more
anxious to conciliate their affection to the Church, and
through the Church to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, by
manifesting in our politico-ecclesiastical conduct that zeal
against abuses, that self-denial, humility, and charity, which
we preach up in private life.

And, lastly, I have hope that much good will come of
their schemes for Church reform, even if ill meant by them
(which I trust they were not), for I count as the greatest
enemies of the Church, even those to whom her present
perils will hereafter be ascribed, the men who have winked
at every scandalous abuse and resisted every attempt at
reasonable amendment.1 There now ! I take out the word
"reform," for fear you should dislike it, though the root
was thought a good one at the time of the Reformation.
But call it amendment. Who for a word would quarrel with
1 Altered from " moderate reform,"

APPENDICES 325

a friend ? Not I, if I could help it. And earnestly I hope
that you will not quarrel with me for this letter. I do not
think you will, or I should scarcely have said so much.
Yet some whom I used to know well, and still love as well
as ever, look now askance when they meet me in their path,
for no other reason that I know of than that I thought ten
pound voters better than close boroughs, and have also
publicly maintained that a Dissenter may get to Heaven,
and ought to be treated as a brother Christian whilst on
earth. Do, dear Newman, well consider where you are
going in this business, and do not, as you threaten, march
past me, unless you are quite sure that you will not here-
after wish to march back again.

Many thanks for your help in searching for an incumbent
for my church at Sedgley. I have as yet made no appoint-
ment. It is by the conscientious discharge of our duties
in our cures, by the due disposal of our patronage, and by
the exercise of self-denial in preferment offered to ourselves,
that I hope we may silence the gainsayers, or, if not, yet
justify the Church. I would gladly enter into an associa-
tion for these objects, if we were not by our vows as
ministers and as Christians already members of just such
a society. Ever Yours, C. GIRDLESTONE.

Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, Oriel College.

R

THE GRAND UNIVERSITY LOGIC STAKES

(See p. 267.)

Late in the Summer Term of 1849 we noticed lying in
Vincent's and Macpherson's windows a slim anonymous
pamphlet labelled " Grand University Logic Stakes." It was
one of the two most brilliant topical jeux d1 esprit which the

326 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

century produced in Oxford, the other being Jackson and
Sinclair's Uniomachia of 1833. It described a recent con-
test for the Praelectorship of Logic, which, founded in
1839, nad been held during ten years by Richard Michell,
and was to be rilled again by election to a second decennial
occupancy. It was written, unavowedly, by Landon, Fel-
low of Magdalen, and Examiner in the Great-Go Schools :
its felicitous personal characterisations of men notable then
and since were heightened by their dexterous adaptation to
the language of the Turf; for Landon, a Yorkshireman
born, was, like Henry Blount in " Marmion," a sworn horse-
courser, and an adept in stable slang. The skit is now
extremely scarce, and the rust of time has settled on the
original polish of its allusive wit and fun ; but, as having
been coeval and conversant with its actors, I have ap-
pended a Notularum Spicilegium.

It unfolds and advertises the

" GRAND UNIVERSITY LOGIC STAKES of 250 sovs., for
Horses of all ages above three years, without restriction
as to weight or breeding. Ten-mile course. Gentlemen
riders. Second Decennial Meeting to come off June 14,
1849.

" The following are the entrances up to present date : —

1. Mr. Bailly Jenks's b. c. Barbadoes, 17 yrs. . . . B. Jowett.

2. Mr. St. John's bl. c. Mainsail, 6 yrs Higgs.

3. Lord Oriel's ch. c. Christmas, 8 yrs Buggon.

4. Her Majesty's br. c. Tom Towzer, 16 yrs. . . . Barrott.

This great and important race, which afforded so much
sport to the academical world in 1839, is now on the
eve of being contested for the second time since its
institution by that sporting chief, the illustrious Gilbert.
The stakes are raised by capping the junior members of
the University to the amount of sixpence a head, which
yields a fund of nearly 250 sovs., liable to a heavy de-

APPENDICES 327

duction for expense of collection, which may, however,
possibly be reduced to a more reasonable percentage.

" Previously to entering on the merits of the competition,
it may not be uninteresting to take a brief survey of the
subsequent history and performances of the horses en-
gaged in the memorable struggle of 1839. For that
race, it may be remembered, eight horses were entered:
St. Michael, Gruel, The White Horse Bob, Lancastrian,
Reformation, Barrister, Stockbroker, and Barbadoes.

" St. Michael, the winner on that occasion, has proved
by his late successes that his merits had not been over-
rated, and it may be mentioned, as a proof of the steady
confidence of his admirers, that he has been a prime
Favourite as well as a successful runner for the different
races he has since contested. He won the Rhetorical
Sweeps in a common canter; and as far as credit was
to be derived from such an event, put in a most re-
spectable appearance for the Bampton Stakes, which is
generally a slow race for aged horses and heavy weights,
rarely accomplished under the hour ; the nominations being
often confined to somewhat inferior cattle. St. Michael
has lately been purchased by an elderly gentleman at a
very high figure. He is located in a very snug stable,
and is already the sire of some very promising stock.

" Gruel continues to make a show in the world, and
stands high in public estimation. He has taken to a
novel line, in which he has come out rather strong.
He appears to have left the Turf altogether for the
present. After a long season in Ireland, where, not-
withstanding several influential backers, he appears to
have been a failure, he returned to the Marquis of
Exeter's stables. His Lordship still drives him in his
four-in-hand, giving him an cccasional day's work at
Radley Farm, where he goes to plough and drill on a
new system with an Irish horse called Single-Peeper.

"The White Horse Bob has been shipped off to the

328 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Antipodes to improve the breed in Her Majesty's Colonies.
He is already said to have attracted considerable notice
among judges in those quarters.

" Lancastrian , though now an aged horse, has of late
displayed evidences of more than ordinary vigour.

" Reformation. This fine old horse still works his coach
with his usual regularity. On the death of his late master
he fell into the hands of a deputation from the Parent
Society, by whom, we are happy to hear, he is driven
gently and kindly treated.

"Barrister. Little has been heard of this horse since
the meeting of 1839. He may possibly have been at
work in the Metropolitan Conveyance department. He
is undoubtedly a superior animal if he would work steadily.
He walked over the other day for one of Her Majesty's
Plates, which will entail upon him a good deal of public
running, from which much is anticipated.

" Stockbroker. Turned out to grass at the expense of
the University, which had no other provision for him.
He has lately had a sack or two of corn sent down, to
keep up his spirits.

" Barbadoes is the last horse on the old list, and the
first on the new one. He is the only one of the old lot
who has had pluck enough to run again. Not long after
the last race he changed owners, Mr. Bailly Jenks having
purchased him from A. Hall, Esq., for 300 sovs. and
half his future earnings. It is gratifying to find that he
has fallen into such good hands, as Mr. Jenks is one
of the most sporting men in the University. His annual
meeting in November for the Foal Stakes is always well
attended, honestly run, and better contested than any
similiar race in the University. He is no less wide
awake in drafting off an unsound or suspicious animal
than in getting hold of good ones to begin with. Three
winners out of four in the last University Trial Stakes
are no small proof of the excellence of Mr. Bailly Jenks's

APPENDICES 329

training establishment. A little more sweating of the
young ones on the Catechetical Course is the only
decided improvement that might be made, as they have
been on several occasions very much distressed for want
of this kind of exercise. Some persons fancy it does
not signify, because they see horses who have quite
shut up at this part of the course go ahead before the
end of the race. Be that as it may, it gives a respectable
finish to the style of the cleverest winner. The great
merit of Barbadoes is his age and steadiness. There
is no danger of his bolting over the ropes or causing
any disturbance on the course ; and there is little doubt
but that Mr. Jenks's well-known colours, the yellow body
and pink sleeves, will be seen well forward in the race.
There are rather heavy books against Christmas, Tom
Towzer, and Mainsail. Barbadoes is free from this dis-
advantage; but on the other hand, many sportsmen
prefer to see a good book made up before they back
a horse to any great amount.

"We have now to make a few remarks on the three
new horses who are to come before the public on the
present occasion, namely the following : —

"Her Majesty's brown colt Tom Towzer, a dark horse,
but one who has a great many friends on the ground
of his careful training for this particular event. He ran for
the University Trial Stakes in 1840, and came out only
a third. Some persons were of opinion that he was
amiss at the time, but whether it was so or not, he has
had ample opportunity since then to mend his pace and
improve his action. It may be a question whether his
style is not too high and too much of the canter for a
University Logic Race. Mr. Samuel Cudsdon, whose
attachment to everything connected with royalty would
naturally ensure his support to her Majesty's horse, has
backed him strongly, and is supposed to have a pot
of money depending on the event.

330 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

" Mr. St. John's Mainsail. A cocky little horse, full
of fun and frolic, but warranted free from vice. His per-
formances have hitherto been first rate, and he is strongly
backed by that eminent sportsman, Sir William Hamilton.
He is a horse of undeniable merit and lasting power : has
been known, even in hot weather, to work a coach for
twelve hours a day, without delay or disappointment to the
passengers. He is admirably supported by his owner, who
backs him in the most spirited manner. His jockey is
sure to do him justice, if we may judge from the way in
which he put along that slow old horse, Grey Roundabout,
for the Members' Plate. N.B. Mainsail's friends are re-
spectfully informed that the proceedings of the day will be
concluded by a first-rate ordinary at the Lamb and Flag.

" Lord Oriel's Christmas. A very fine colt, got by the
Provost out of Brascinia. Like Tom Towzer's, his
action is perhaps a touch too high, but he is one of
the right sort for this kind of race. Some had objected
to his rider as too heavy, and a trifle long in the leg ;
but he carried him uncommonly well on the way
from Worcester right into Lord Oriel's stable, running
bang over a poor fellow of the name of Smith, who
happened to be in the way. 'Tap the Physic,' and
'The Shady Cloud,' have somewhat shaken public
confidence in this stable by their recent performances;
and there have been other melancholy instances of un-
soundness amongst Lord Oriel's horses, arising possibly
from over-training. His Lordship has done all that
man could do to keep them on their legs; and in
refusing a warranty to the Marquis of Exeter, when
he purchased Shady Cloud a few seasons back, gave
ample proofs of the correctness of his judgment and
the honesty of his conduct. Many sporting men of high
reputation would be glad to see Christmas a winner,
but the general impression is that the race will be
among the other three.

APPENDICES 331

" The following is the latest quotation of the odds :—

" 3 to 2 against Barbadoes.
2 to i against Mainsail.
4 to I against Tom Towzer.
15 to i against Christmas.

" Gentlemen proposing to be present at the race are in-
formed that everything has been arranged with a view to
their comfort and convenience by the Vice-Chancellor and
the Proctors, under the able superintendence of Mr. P.
Bliss, the much respected Clerk of the Course. On entering
the Grand Stand they are earnestly requested not to push
one another more than is absolutely necessary, as there is
plenty of accommodation for all.

"The thanks of the University are due to the owners of
St. Michael for not starting him on the present occasion,
as, in case of his appearance, this exciting race might have
shared the fate of the Lady Margaret Stakes, and de-
generated into a dull, periodical walk over.

" Postscript.

"Friday morning, June 15. The following is the result
of the race, decided yesterday : —

"Mr. Bailly Jenks's br. c. Barbadoes, 17 years (B. Jowett), I.
Mr. St. John's b. c. Mainsail, 6 years (Higgs), II.
Her Majesty's br. c. Tom Towzer, 16 years (Barrott), III.
Lord Oriel's ch. c. Christmas, 8 years (Buggon), drawn."

Here ended Landon's jeu d* esprit. It remains to ex-
plain the allusions. The 1849 candidates were Barbadoes,
Mainsail, Christmas, Tom Towzer.

The brown colt Barbadoes was Henry Wall of Balliol,
born in that island. Jenks was the irreverent sobriquet
of Dr. Jenkyns, Master of Balliol. Wall was proposed
by Jowett. The black colt Mainsail was Hs L. Mansel
of St. John's, afterwards Dean of St. Paul's, proposed
by Dr. Higgs of the same College. The chestnut colt

332 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Christmas was C. P. Chretien of Oriel, proposed by
Burgon. Her Majesty's brown colt Tom Towzer was
Thomas Bowser Thompson of Queen's. His proposer
was Barrow of Queen's, Principal of St. Edmund's Hall, a
learned cheery little man, but a strong Tractarian ; while
the Hall, long under the influence of Daniel Wilson, had
become a nursery of Evangelicals. He soon resigned,
went abroad, and died a Jesuit. The years represent each
man's years of residence.

The "sporting chief" was Ashurst Turner Gilbert,
Principal of Brasenose, in whose Vice-Chancellorship
the " Readership," as it was originally called, came into
existence. He was made Bishop of Chichester in 1842.
The salary of ,£250 was to be provided by a small
payment from every member of the University, servitors
excepted, under the degree of M.A. The arrangement
did not answer, was abandoned, and is here ridiculed.

The eight horses for the 1839 race had been St. Michael,
Gruel, The White Horse Bob, Lancastrian, Reformation,
Stockbroker, Barbadoes.

St. Michael was Richard Michell, Reader in Logic
during the ten previous years. The " Rhetorical Sweeps "
was the post of Public Orator, which he had for some
time held. While delivering the Crewe Oration from
the rostrum at Commemoration he used to gesticulate
with his cap. I remember once his extending it with
an animated flourish, when an undergraduate in the
gallery just above him dropped a halfpenny into it.
By the "Bampton Stakes" was meant, of course, the
Bampton Lectureship, which he held in 1849. His
sermons, which I dutifully attended, were extraordinarily
tedious. The elderly gentleman was Macbride, Principal
of Magdalen Hall. He was very learned, very ugly, and
the only Head besides Marsham of Merton who was
not in Orders. When Gandell, the Chaplain, was late
for or absent from Chapel, the old man, though a lay-

APPENDICES 333

man, used to read the entire service himself. He had
made Michell Vice-Principal in succession to Jacobson,
who became Regius Professor of Divinity.

Gruel was an amusingly apt name for William Sewell
of Exeter. The " novel line " refers to his editing his sister
Elizabeth's religious novels, "Amy Herbert," "Margaret
Percival," and the rest, eagerly read once, now, I fear,
forgotten. He wrote also himself a hysterical novel called
" Hawkstone." His " season in Ireland '' was spent in
the foundation of St. Columba's College; the " influential
backers " were Lord Adare, the Primate Lord John
Beresford, and Dr. Todd of Trinity College, Dublin. He
broke away from this enterprise, nobody quite knew why,
and transferred his energies to Radley. Single-Peeper was
Singleton, its first Warden.

The White Horse Bob was Bob Lowe of Magdalen,
an Albino with snowy hair. He was a popular Class Coach,
but left Oxford for Australia, returning after a distinguished
career to become a member of Mr. Gladstone's Government,
and to be made Lord Sherbrook. His first wife was
a Miss Orrid. It was said to be an " 'Orrid Low match."

Lancastrian was T. W. Lancaster, formerly Fellow of
Queen's, who lived in Oxford, an elderly man with an
elderly wife, for a time Usher of the Magdalen Choristers,
and frequently Examiner in the Little-Go Schools. The
" evidence of more than ordinary vigour " refers to £
sermon he had preached before the University, in which
he had spoken of Hampden as " that atrocious Professor."
He was severely censured by his College, and published a
lengthy pamphlet in self-defence.

Reformation was John Hill, Vice-President of St.
Edmund's Hall. His " late master " was Principal Grayson,
who died in 1843; a ponderous being with a handsome
wife much younger than himself. He is mentioned
contumeliously in " Black Gowns and Red Coats." The
" deputation from the Parent Society " was W. Thompson of

334 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

Queen's, who succeeded Grayson at the Hall, and was
an ardent supporter of the Church Missionary Society.
Herein Hill was strongly in accord with his chief, being
always appointed to receive the Society's deputation at
the Oxford meetings. He was the recognised leader of
the Low Church party, giving tea-parties to like-minded
undergraduates once or twice a week at his house in
the High, where pietistic talk, prayer, exposition, and
hymnody were lightened by the presence of his four
charming daughters.

Barrister was Henry Halford Vaughan. Fellow of Oriel.
He had left Oxford to practice at the Chancery Bar,
the "Metropolitan Conveyance." "Her Majesty's Plate"
was the Regius Professorship of Modern History, to which
Vaughan was appointed in 1848. His high reputation
drew at first large audiences to the Theatre, but his lectures
were too condensed and close in texture to be followed
easily by the casually-minded undergraduate, nor was there
at that time any Modern History School to stimulate
serious study.

Stockbroker was Dr. C. W. Stocker of St. John's. He had
been " turned out to grass " on a country living in the gift
of Convocation. The " sack of corn " was a grant of
money bestowed on him by the University for some
parochial purpose.

Barbadoes^ as we have said, was Henry Wall. By his
" change of owners " is meant his election to a Bursary and
Fellowship at Balliol from St. Alban Hall, of which he was
Vice-Principal. The "Foal Stakes" was, of course, the
annual contest for the Balliol Scholarships. The " drafting
off" meant expulsion from the College; two recent
instances gave point to the passage. The " three winners
out of four " were James Hornby, afterwards Head Master
of Eton, Henry Smith, Professor, and Curator of the
Museum, and William Warburton, now Canon of Win-
chester. The "Catechetical Course" was the viva voce

APPENDICES 335

examination in Divinity for Greats ; in this several Balliol
men had shown weakness. Jenks's colours, " yellow body
and pink sleeves," commemorate the nickname " Yellow
Belly" borne by Dr. Jenkyns's butler, almost as notable
a character as his master, and arrayed always in a
protuberant canary-coloured waistcoat.

Tom Towzer was Thomas Bowser Thompson of Queen's,
a "dark horse," because, being idle in his younger days,
he obtained only a third in Greats. Samuel Cudsdon
was Bishop Wilberforce, who energetically supported
Thompson. Those who remember Mansel will appreciate
the description of Mainsail. He was the exponent in
Oxford of Sir William Hamilton's philosophy. His coach-
ing for twelve hours a day was one of the ben trovato myths
which sprang up round him and Jowett. When Fearon of
Balliol, afterwards H. M. Inspector of Schools, was within
six or seven weeks of the Schools, he went to Wall with his
Logic. Wall examined and dismissed him, "could not in
so short a time make up for previous neglect." Jowett
heard of it and sent for him. " I hear Mr. Wall gives you
up ; I will undertake you, if you like. I am engaged always
till 12 at night, but if you like to come to me from 12 till i,
I will do the best I can." For six weeks the midnight work
went on ; then said Jowett, " I think you may face the exa-
miners now" — and Fearon got his First. A "Jowler
myth " most likely, but showing the estimation in which he
was held. Hansel's " owner " was President Wynter ; his
"jockey" was little Dr. Higgs, who had been an active
canvasser for Charles Grey Round, "Grey Roundabout,"
a parliamentary candidate for Oxford University in 1847.
The " Lamb and Flag " were the armorial bearings of St.
John's ; a big dinner was given in Hall after the voting to
all the St. John's supporters of Mansel.

G. P. Chretien of Oriel, Christmas, had been elected to
a Fellowship from Brasenose (Brascinia). His rider was
Burgon, whose queer person was supported by two un-

336 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD

usually " long legs." He had been elected from Worcester
to an Oriel Fellowship over the head of Goldwin Smith ;
is it not written, acrimoniously, in Mark Pattison's
" Memories " ? " Tap the Physic " was Clough, a play on
Toper- na-Fuosich. "Shady Cloud" was Froude, whose
"Shadows of the Clouds by Zeta" had been published
in 1847. He afterwards suppressed it. The "instances
of unsoundness" refers to the Newmanian secessions.
Hawkins refused a testimonial, or " warranty, " to Froude
when he stood for, and was elected to, a Fellowship at
Exeter.

The "Clerk of the Course" was Dr. Philip Bliss, Uni-
versity Registrar. The " Grand Stand " was the Divinity
School, where the voting arrangements were outrageously
inconvenient. I remember once, when we were struggling
to record our votes, Archdeacon Bartholomew, at the far
end of the room, shouting a pathetic appeal to the Vice-
Chancellor, Dr. Williams, who answered that unless the
gentleman should hold his peace, he would send a bedel to
remove him.

The " Lady Margaret Stakes " was the Margaret Professor-
ship of Divinity, then a biennial appointment, but renewed
as a matter of course. It had long been held by Dr.
Fausset.

S
THE WHITEHALL PREACHERSHIPS

For this interesting history of an extinct but once
famous institution I am indebted, as for much besides,
to Dr. Farrar of Durham.

Oxford being disloyal to the House of Hanover,
Walpole advised George II. to summon Oxford divines
to preach before him, as an endeavour to conciliate the
University. It being pointed out that this would be

APPENDICES 337

looked upon as a slight to Cambridge, it was determined
to take from each University twelve resident College
Fellows, each in turn to preach once a fortnight, and
their appointment to be permanent so long as their
residence continued. It was found, however, after a time
that the abler Fellows, passing away from the Universities,
ceased to hold their office; while men unmarried and
unpromoted stayed on obsolete and senile. One of these
was Griffith. Howley, when Bishop of London, hearing
complaints of his preaching, went to hear him, and found
him worse than he had thought possible. After service
he followed him into the vestry. " Mr. Griffith, I want to
speak to you about your sermon." Bowing low, Griffith
replied : " I beg that your Lordship will not do so : it
is a sufficient compliment to me that you should be
present ; I cannot bear to hear your commendation of
the sermon." Howley went away discomfited; and
ascending to Canterbury soon after, bequeathed the
difficulty to his successor Blomfield. He attempted inter-
ference, and was in his turn foiled by Mo.; but as the
Whitehall Chapel Royal, in which the sermons were
delivered, needed extensive repair, he took the opportunity
of dismissing all the preachers ; and when two years later
the Chapel was reopened, obtained the Queen's consent
to a change of system, appointing two resident Fellows,
one from each University, to preach month by month
for two years only, with a salary of ^300 a year from
the Queen's privy purse. Of course, Mo. was not re-
appointed : he used to come to the Chapel, seat himself
in some corner which the preacher's voice ordinarily failed
to reach, and say aloud from time to time — " I cannot
hear a word."

INDEX

Abernethy, 65

Acland, Sir H. (Dr.), 33, 37, 45,

&c., 52, 58, 142, 154, 315
Acland, Sir T., sen., 89, 91
Acland, Sir T., jun., 84, 85, 86, 88,

&c., 217, 262
Adams, W., 85, 169
Adare, Lord, 278
Adelaide, Queen, 4
Albert, Prince, 267
Aldrich, Dean, 71
Alford, Dean, 249
Allbutt, Professor, 1 1 1
Allen (of Holland House), 142
Angelo (fencer), 107
Argyll, Duke of, 241
Armitstead, W. G., 201
Arnold, Dr., 182, 183, 193, 195,

210, 211, 218, 231
Arnold, Matthew, 97, 110,121, 184,

283, 284
Atterbury, Charles, 145

B

Badcock, 15

Baden Powell, Professor, 18, 42, 49

Baden Powell, Mrs., 17

Bagot, Bishop, 129

Baker, G. W., 35

Balfour, Professor, 58

Bandinel, Dr., 161, 170

Banks, Sir J., 36

Barnes, Dr., 129

Bartlett, R. E., 109, 247

Batchelor, Eleanor, 290

Bathurst, Stewart, 269

Bathurst, W., 19

Baxters (gardeners), 34

Baxter (printer), 293

Bayliss, Judge, 72

Bayly, E. G., of Pembroke, 153

Bennett (St. Paul's, Knightsbridge),

143

Bennett (Rugby Tonsor), 217
Benson, Archbishop, 272
Beresford, Lord J., 278
Besant, Walter, in
Bethell (Lord Westbury), 198
Bishop, Sir Henry, 73, 81
Bishop (of the Angel), 291
Blachford, Lord, 153
Blackstone, Charles, 244
Blagrave (Magdalen), 163
Blagrove (violinist), 76
Blanco White* 185, 262
Bland, Archdeacon, 216
Blaydes. See Calverley
Bliss, Dr., 152, 162
Blomfield, Bishop, 27, 275, 337
Blomfield, A., 310
Bloxam, Dr., 170
Bloxam, Matthew, 84, 165
Blyth (organist), 77
Bockh, Professor, 126
Bode (Christchurch), 150, 155
Boone, Shergold, 115
Bothie, 98, 120, 305, and see

Clough

339

340

INDEX

Bourne, Dr., 63

Bouverie, 137

Bowen, Ch., 310

Boyle, Dean, 275

Boxall, Miss, 7

Bradley, Dean, 272

Brancker, Tom, 174, &c.

Brasenose Ale, 94

Bree, Archdeacon, 28

Brereton, Canon, 89, 217

Bridges, President, 239, 308

Bridges (Fellow of Corpus), 239, &c.

Bright, John, 199

Brodie, Sir B., sen., 56, 65

Brodie, Sir B., jun., 57, 58, 98

Brookfield (Cambridge), 86

Browning, 2

Bruno, Dr., 270

Buckland, Dr., 36, &c.,48, 49, 141

Buckland, Mrs., 38

Buckland, Frank, 37, 38, 39, 41,

1 06, &c.
Buckley, 108
Bucknill, "Hip-hip," 232
Bull, Dr., 26, &c.
Buller, Charles, 86
Bulteel, 268
Bulwer Lytton, 69
Bunsen, Baron, 90, 147
Burgon, 54, 190, 233, 241, 243, 273
Burne-Jones, 51
Burney, Miss, 9, 72
Burrows, Commander, 296
Burrows, Sir G., 65
Burton, "Jack and Tom," 7
Butler (of Shrewsbury), 206, 215
Butler, Bishop, 213, 265
Byron, 127, 303

Cain and Abel, 252
Calverley, 109, &c., 247

Canning, G., 7, 69

Canning, Lord, 36, 185

Cardwell, Mrs., 52

Cardwell, M. R., 95

Carlyle, 56, 92, 222

Carroll, Lewis, 155, &c.

Cecil, Lord R., 227

Chamberlain, " Tom," 108

Chambers (Magdalen), 164

Chambers (Proctor), 192

Chapman, President, 224

Chapman (naturalist), 42

Charles I., 163, 296

Charlotte, Queen, 131

Chase, Dr., 126, 242

Chretien (Oriel), 134

Church, Dean, 85, 153, 224

Clarence, Duke of, 102

Clark (Taunt on), 193

Claughton, Bishop, 84, 224, 238

Clemend (violinist), 76

Clifton (Brasenose), 72

Clough, 97, &c., 126, 184, 196, 205 ,

212

Cole, W. G., 224, 225
Cole (Papirius Carbo), 225, 230
Colenso, Bishop, 209
Coleridge, S. T., 2, 117
Coleridge, Herbert, 117, &c.
Coleridge, Sara, 117
Coles, Henry, 175
Collins (the poet), 258
Combe (of the Clarendon), 49
Compton (Rugby master), 272
Congreve (Wadham), 121
Conington, John, 104, 105, 206, 207,

222, 276
Conybeare, 276
Copeland, 29, 224
.Copleston, Provost, 16, 17, 121, &c.
Corfe, Dr., 77
Corfe, Mrs., 51, 77
Corfe, Charles, 51

INDEX

Costar, 4, 145

Cotton (Rugby master), 197

Cotton , Dr. , frontispiece

Cotton, Archdeacon, 127

Cowie, Dean, 219

Cox, George, 114, 170

Cox, Hay ward, 254, 271

Cox, John, 114

Cox, Valentine, 118, 243

Coxe, Henry, 163, 242, 243

Crabbe, 2

Cramer, Dr., 116, 309

Cross, 241

Crotch, Dr., 73

Crowe (Orator), 171, 172

Cure, Capel, 220

D

Dale, J., 300

Dalhousie, Lord, 85

Dalton, Reginald, 60

Damien, Father, 186

Darnel (of Corpus), 1 6

Darwin fight, 52, 56, 139

Daubeny, Dr., 31, &c., 49, 54, 57,

163, 164, 289
Davies, "Tom," 21
Davison, 17
Davy, Sir H., 41
Deane, Sir T., 56
Deichmann, 148
Delane, 51
Denison, Archdeacon, 179, 181, 191,

&c., 318

Denison, Bishop, 268, 269
Derby, Lord, 49, 102, 154, 304,

" 3H

Detenus, 24, 173
Dibdin, T. F., 12
Dickens, 2

Dickinson (novelist), 85
Dindorf, 125

Disraeli, 199, 320

Dolby, Madame, 155

Dolling, Father, 186

Dollinger, 228

Donkin, Professor, 72, 98

Dons, 19

Douglas, Helen, 127

Doyle, Sir F., 86

Draper, Professor, 54

Driffield (musical amateur), 72

Dunbar, 12, &c., 116, 299

Duncans, the brothers, 115, 170

Duncan, Phil., 35, 175,

East wick, 23

Eden (Oriel), 63, 179, 190, &c.

Egerton, Sir P., 37

Elgin, Lord, 85

Ellerton, Dr., 22

Elvey, George, 74

Elvey, Stephen, 73

Eothen. See Kinglake

Erie, Christopher, 6, 122, 123, 172

Erie, Sir W., 5, 17

Erie, T. W., 240

Evans, Dr. S., 215, 272

Evans ( Pembroke), 242

Eveleigh, Provost, 186

Everett, U.S. minister, 151

Exmouth, Lord, 24, 241

Faber, Frank, 116, 160, 164, 165
Faber, " Waterlily," 116, 169
Fanshawe, Catherine, 67, 99, 303
Fanshawe, Frederick, 272
Faussett, R., 286
Faussett, T., 247, &c.
Fichie, 222
Fitzroy, Admiral, 55

342

INDEX

Foote, 175
Foulkes, Dr., 7
Foulkes, Mrs., 7
Foulkes, E. S., 101
Fox (Queen's), 308
Freeman, J. A., 102, 105
Freytag, Professor, 135
Froude, H., 116, 121, 142, 186, 292
Froude, J. A., 185, 262, 276
Frowd, Dr., 12, 24, &c., 241
Furneaux, Henry, 48, 99, 120, 240,
245, &c., 286

Gabriel, Dr., 15

Gaisford, Dean, 37, 71, 106, 116,
i*3, fee.

Gaisford, Miss, 126
Garbett, Professor, 152, 225
Gardiner, S., 126
George, " Mother," 290
Gilbert, Dr., 14, 98, 225, 308
Giles, Archdeacon, 94
Girdlestone, Charles, 321
Gladstone, 60, 61, 85, 86, 115,

202, 228
Goethe, 221, 255
Goldsmith, 213

Goodenough (Christchurch), 128
Goodsir, Professor, 46
Goose, " Mother," 290
Gordon, Osborne, 53, 120, 127,

155, &c., 311, 313
Gore, Bishop, 214
Goss, Dr., 8 1
Goulburn, Dean, 141, 217, 231,

269, &c.

Grant, Archdeacon, 170
Grantham, G., 75
Granville, Lady, 7
Gray, 258, 260
Green, T. H., 118, 221, &c.

Green, "Paddy," 198

Greg, 214

Gregorians, 76

Gregorie, David, 66

Grenville, Lord, 37

Greswell, E., 7, 240

Greswell, R., 54

Griffith, Mo., 12, 27, &c., 336

Griffiths (Wadham), 49

Grote, 133

Guidotti, 291

Guillemard (Proctor), 153, 244

Gutch, J., 289

Gutch, Sarah, 289

H

Hacker, Marshall, 8, 162

Haggitt (Wegg Prosser), 286

Hallam, A., 84, 86, 121

Halle, 72

Hamilton, Bishop, 28, 85, 86, 268,

289

Hammond (Merton), 7
Hampden, Bishop, 18, 100, 244, 275
Hancock (Christchurch porter), 126
Hardy, Gathorne, 60, 61
Hare, Archdeacon, 264
Harington (Brasenose), 123
Hascoll, Captain, 279
Hawes, Miss, 226
Hawkins, Provost, 18, 126, 179,

186, &c., 192
Heathcote, W. B., 50, 175
Henderson, Dean, 165
Hendry, Abel, 17
Henslow, Professor, 34, 53, 57
Herbert, Algernon, 139
Herbert, Edward, 138
Herostratus, 162
Hewlett (chorister), 75, 82
Hewlett (novelist), 85
Hext (Corpus), 25, 241, &c.

INDEX

343

Hibbert, Julian, 136

Hill,J., 96, 271

Hinds, Howell, 18, 182

Hobhouse, Bishop, 269

Hobhouse, Lord, 98

Hodgkinson, J., 300

Hodson, Frodsham, 201

Holland, Lady, 142

Holland, J. M., 81

Holme (Corpus), 27

Hooker, Sir J., 56

Hope (Museum), 48, 58, 59

Hope, Scott, 85, 89

Horseman, Miss, 9, &c., 66, 175,

179, I9i

Hoskins, "Mad," 172

Hounslow, 269

Howard, G., 235

Howard (of Radley), 278

Howe, Lord, 5

Howley, Archbishop, 27, 37, 275,

336

Hubbard, 281
Hughes (artist), 52
Hughes, George, 1 14, 194, 196, 242
Hughes, Tom, 114, 194, &c.
Hughes, J. W., 287
Hullah, 76
Hunt, Holman, 49
Hussey, R., 126, 150
Huxley, 53, &c., 210, 228

I

Ingram, President, 116, 223, 224
Ireland, Dr., 63, 64
Irving, of Balliol, 119, 188

J

Jackson, Cyril, 124, 125
Jackson, of the Uniomachia, 94
Jacobson, Dr., 167, 275

James (confectioner), 291

Jeffs, " Mother," 290

Jelf, Dr., 1 30

Jelf, W. E., 76, 132, 150, &c.

Jenkyns, Dr., 116, 200

Jenner (Magdalen), 162

Jephson, Dr., 233

Jeune, Dr., 51, 144, 310

Johnson, Dr., 24, 140, 144, 166,

213

Johnson, Manuel, 49, 184
Jones, Collier, 275, 309
Jowett, 54, 98, 121, 188, 202, 212,

222, 228, 253, &c., 259, 261
Joy, " Parson," 292
Jubber, 292
Jullien, 76

Karslake, W. H., 29, 242

Keble, J., 2, 17, 37, 184, 225,

292, 293

Kett, "Horse," 15, &c., 224
Kidd, Dr., 16, 47, 62, 63
Kidd, Misses, 63
King, J. R., 310
Kinglake, A. W., 80, 212
Kingsley, Charles, 148, 195
Kingsley, Henry, 1 19
Kitchin, Dean, 150, 312

Lake, Dean, 182, 185, 187, 188,

196, 205, &c., 269, 271
Lancaster, Harry, 206
Lancaster (of Queen's), 158
Landon (Magdalen), 277, 296
Land or, Savage, 16
Lang, A., 287

Latimer (wine merchant), 293, 300
Laud's tree, 296

344

INDEX

Le Mesurier, 286

Lee, Harriett, 67

Lee, Lancelot, 173, 174

Lee, President, 237

Lee, Miss, 232

Leonard, 65

Levett (Christchurch), 128

Lewis (Jesus), 151

Ley, Jacob, 150, 253

Liddell, 37, 85, 117, 145, 154,

i6>o,1foi, 202, 315
Liddon, 134
Linwood, Miss, 150
Linwood, Professor, 150
Litton, " Donkey," 271
Liverpool, Lord, 125
Lloyd, Bishop, 128, 136, 268
Lloyd, Mrs. and the Misses,

129

Lloyd, Foster, 150
Lockhart, 62, 65
Logic Stakes, 326
Lonsdale, J., 98
Lonsdale, Miss, 256
Lothian, Lord, 227
Louse, " Mother," 290
Lowe, " Bob," 94, 202
Lowndes (oarsman), 114
Lyttelton, Lord, 232, 318

M

Macaulay, in, 273
Macbride, 63, 115, 286, 308
Maclaren, 108
Maclean, Donald, 5
Macmullen (Corpus), 240
M'Neile, 231
Maconochie, 134
Macray, Dr., 164
Madan (of Bodleian), 12, 310
Malan, G. C, 95, &c.

Malmesbury, Lord, 87

Manning, 86, 88, 169, 170, 180,

228

Mansel, Dean, 60, 248, 264
Marriott, Charles, 95, 133, 152,

179, 189, &c.
Marriott, John, sen., 17
Marriott, John, jun., 190
Marsham, Dr., 307
Martyrs' Memorial, 295
Massey, M. P., 92
Massie (Uniomachia), 94
Matthews, Arthur, 302
Matthews, Colonel, 302
Matthews, Henry, 13, 302
Maude (of Queen's), 24
Maurice, F. D., 89, 195, 222,

261, &c.

Maurice, Dr. Peter, 74
Mayow (Uniomachia), 95
Menzies, Fletcher, 113
Menzies (Brasenose), 72
Merivale, Dean, 86
Merry, W. W., 310
Meyrick, F., 227, &c.
Michell, R., 59
Microscopic Society, 56
Mill, J. S., 263
Millais, 49
Milton, 258

Moberly, Dr., 98, 236, 246, 275
Monro, 52
Moon (oarsman), 74
Morris, W., 5, 53
Morris, "Jack," 151, 243
Mozley, J., 169, 184
Mozley, T., 17, 181
Miiller, Max, 48, 72, 80, 90, 146,

&c., 202, 203, 276
Mundella, Rt. Hon., 101
Mundy (Magdalen porter), 35
Murray, G. W., 76
Museum, 46, &c.

INDEX

345

N

Nares, Dr., 175

Neate, Charles, 37, 174, 189, 198

Ness, Charlotte, 14

Nestor, i, 82, 298

Neve, Mrs., 7

Newman, Francis, 180, 185, 204, &c

Newman, J. H., 2, 17, 71, 100, 116
135, 142, 163, 179, &c., 190,
192, 197, 217, 218, 224, 226,
227, 228, 234, &c., 260, 262,
275, 287, 289, 322

Newman, T. H., 166, &c.

Newman, Mrs., 179, 284

Nicol, Professor, 133

Noetics, The, 17, 173

Norman (of Radley), 281

Norris, President, 240

Oakley, Sir H., 51, 77

Ogle, Dr., 47, 63

Ogle, Octavius, 167

Orlebar (Rugby), 197

Otter (Corpus), 120, 231, 241

Ouseley, Sir F., 73, 77, 78, 81, 82,

&c, 148

Owen, Professor, 37, 52
Oxford, Bishop of, see Wilberforce
Oxford Novels, 85, 197
Oxford Spy, 64, 116

Palmer, Roundell, 84, 95
Palmer, William, 84, 181
Palmerston, Lord, 267
Parker, Charles, 222
Parker, Joseph, 17, 292
Parnell (St. John's), 152
Parr, Dr., 15, 161

Parrott (organist), 82

Parsons, Bishop, 15, 291

Parsons (Old Bank), 219

Patterson, Monsignor, 226, &c.

Pattison, M. J., 295

Pattison, Mark, 37, 95, 121, 133,
136, 181, 187, 192, 213, 216,
223, 228, 252, &c., 295

Pattison, Dora, 256, 260

Pearse, Mrs., 7

Peck water, 129

Peel, Sir Robert, 117, 125, 183

Pegge, Sir Christopher, 13, 45, 62,
299

Phillips, Professor, 32, 44, 49

Piozzi, Mrs., 73

Plato, 87, 156, 214, 275

Plumer, C. J., 235

Plummer, Dr., 230, 238
Plumtre, Dr., 233, and frontispiece
Pollen, Ilungerford, 50, 52
Pope, 7, 31, 54, 105, 145, 258
Powell, see Baden
Price, Mrs. B., 52
Prinsep (artist), 52
Prout (Christchurch), 155
Pugin, 158

Pusey, Dr., 36, 134, 136, &c., 151,
180, 184, 214, 225, 261, 263,
264, 275, 310
Pusey, Lady Lucy, 131
Pusey, Philip, sen., 90, 133, 143
Pusey, Philip, jun., 138
Pyne, Louisa, 77

Quick, Edward, 23

Radnor, Lord, 183
Randall, "Tom," 114

346

INDEX

Reade, Charles, 165

Reid, Wemyss, 84

Reinagle (musician), 76

Reynolds (Proctor), 153

Richards (Exeter), 275

Richardson (flute player), 76

Rickards (Oriel), 293

Riddell, James, 202

Ridding, Arthur, 112, 230, 240

Rigaud, John, 26, 163, 166

Risley, W., 174

Risley, "Bob," 280

Robertson, Charles, 16, 64, 154

Rogers (artist), 53

Rogers, Thorold, 100, &c., 133,

188, 219, 247, 255
Rolleston, Dr., 32, 58, 140
Rose, Hugh James, 1 36
Rossetti, 52, 53
Rothschild, 173
Routh, Dr., 116, 159, &c., 172
Routh, Mrs., 30, 159
Rowden, G., 72
Royds (oarsman), 113
Rudd (Oriel), 23
Ruskin, 33, 52, 98
Russell, Lord J.f 276
Rutland, Duke of, 89

Sadler (confectioner), 292
Salisbury, Lord, 228
Sanctuary (Exeter), 129
Sarratt (chess player), 66
Sawell, J., 74, 167
Schlippenbach, Countess, 130
Scott, Dr., 94, 125, 169, 200, 212,

fee.
Scott, Walter, 2, 143, 260, 266,

291

Sellon, Miss, 134
Selwyn (Winchester boy), 1 10

Senior Fellows, 21

Septem contra Camum, 113, 306

Sewell, J. E. (New College), 52,

170, 177, &c.

Sewell, R. (Magdalen), 169
Sewell, W. (Exeter), 49, 274, &c.
Shaftesbury, Lord, 186
Shaw, Dr., 125, 126
Shea, the brothers, 52
Sheppard, J. W., 310
Sheppard, " Tommy," 232
Short, "Tommy," 18, 84, 229, &c.t

287
Shuttleworth, Warden, 22, 23, 37,

147, 168, 275, 309, 316
Sibthorp (Magdalen), 164
Sinclair, W., 94

Singleton (Radley), 278, 279, 280
Skene, of Rubislaw, 225, 266
Skey, Dr., 65
Skidmore, 52, 160
Slatter (schoolmaster), 286, &c.
Smith, Cecilia, 123
Smith, Dean, 123
Smith, Goldwin, 104, 105, 297
Smith, Henry, 61
Smith, Payne, 209
Smith, Sydney, 17, 18, 47, 193, 292
Smythe, Miss, 51
Sneyd, Warden, 309
Spedding (Cambridge), 86
Spiers, 249
Stainer, Sir J., 82
Stanhope (artist), 52
Stanley, A. P., 79, 97,98, 121, 182,

185, 196, 198, 267, 269, 271,

273

Stanley, Bishop, 79
Stanley, Lady, 303
Stanley, Lord, 79
Stephen, Fitzjames, 208
Stephens (angler), 290
Sterling, J., 86, 262

INDEX

347

Stowe (Oriel), 286

Streets, names of, 296

Strong, Captain, 49

Strong, Professor, 229

Stzrelecki, Count, 92

Sunderland (Cambridge), 84

Swanwick, Anna, 258

Symons, "Ben," 109, 152, 204,

and frontispiece
Symonds, Charles, 297

Tait, Archbishop, 37, 95, 217

Talboys, 201, 292

Tatham, Dr., 147

Taunton, Lord, 36, 90

Temple, Archbishop, 105, 212,

214, 216, &c., 272
Tennyson, 86, 121, 213, 251, 257,

264

Thackeray, 76
Thalberg, 76
Theobald, "White," 230
Thistlethwayte, F., 286
Thistlethwayte, Mrs., 92
Thomas (naturalist), 43
Thomas, Vaughan, 243, &c.
Thompson (Trinity, Cambridge), 86,

223, 267

Thompson (Lincoln), 26, 218, 254
Thomson, Archbishop, 37, 77, 136,
265, &c.

Throgmorton, Sir R., 133

Thunny, the, 155, 315

Thursby, Walter, 230

Ticknor (American), 92

Todd, Dr., 278

Tremenheere (New College), 170

Tripp, H., 278

Tuckwell, 62, &c., 302

Tuckwell, Dr., 224

Tyler (Oriel), 235

U
Uniomachia, 93, 200

V

Vaughan, Halford, 85, 106, 211
Venables (curate, St. Paul's), 50
Victoria, Queen, 2, 5, 241

W

Waldegrave, Bishop, 267, 269

Walker, Professor, 43, 204

Wall, Dr., 62, 63

Wall, Henry, 99, 203, &c.

Wall, Miss, 204

Ward, Lord, 224

Ward, W. G., 95, 100, 217, 264

Warton, T., 162, 224, 283

Weatherby (Balliol), no

Wellesley, Dr., 20

Wellesley, Lord, 248

Wellington, Duke of, 2, 113, 125,

133. HI

West (apothecary), 64, 299
Westbury, Lord, 198
West wood, Professor, 20, 58, &c.
Whately, Archbishop, 17, 37, 121,

1 68

Whewell, Dr., 223
White, see Blanco
Whorwood (Magdalen), 166, &c.
Whorwood, Madame, 166
Wilberforce, R., 186
Wilberforce, Samuel, 50, 53, 54i

154, 172, 199, 267, 314, 320
Wilkins, Harry, 35, no, 117
Williams (botanical professor), 32,

289

Williams, Henry, 174
Williams, Isaac, 180, 181, 224, &c.,

287, 292

INDEX

Williams, Miss, 244

Williams, Warden, 73, 164, 177

Wilson (Moral Philosophy), 188

Wilson, R. F., 189

Wingfield, Mrs. (Oxford), 236

Wingfield, Mrs. (Tickencote), 68

Wintle (St. John's), 307

Wirion, General, 173

Wolff, Joseph, 243

Wood, Anthony, 163

Wood (apothecary), 64

Wood, J. G., 46, 107

Woodward, 51, &c.

Wooll, Dr., 231

Wootten, Dr., 29, 45

Wootten (mayor), 4

Wordsworth, Charles, 85, 87, &c.,

248, 304, 3°5
Wordsworth, Mrs., 87
Wordsworth, William, 222, 252,

258

Wormald (oarsman), 1 1 1
Wren, Walter, 1 1 1 , &c.
Wyatt, James, 49, 292, 307
Wynter, Dr., 151

Yonge, Miss, 142
Young, G., 1 6

THE END

Printed by BALI.ANTYNE, HANSON &•» Co
Edinburgh &> London

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